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SALES & BUSINESS
LANGUAGE & BEHAVIOR
PERSUASION ENGINEERING
by
Richard Bandler
and
John La Valle
Meta Publications, Inc. P.O. Box 1910, Capitola, CA 95010 (831) 464-0254 • Fax (831) 464-0517
©Copyright 1996 by Meta Publications. Printed in the United States of America. All rights reserved. This book, or any parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any manner whatsoever without the written permission of the Publisher.
Library of Congress Card Catalog Number: 95-076816 ISBN 0-916990-36-2
Second Printing- July 2000
o DEDICATIONS
To Paula, the most beautiful woman in the world.
— Richard
Dedicated to Kathleen, who gives me all of every-
thing I can ever desire, and to John Sebastian, who
teaches me what learning is all about. Together,
they are who they are so I can be who I am.
— John
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Introduction....................................................................... vii
Chapter One: To Begin With ............................................. 1
Chapter Two: The Selling Process ............................. . . . 19
What do you sell?
Chapter Three: The Basic Stuff .........................................25
Rep systems
Beyond Eye Patterns
Anchoring?
Chapter Four: Precision Elicitation ................................... 59
Meta Model/Milton Model Distinctions
The Motivators
The Timeline
The Meta Programs
Positioning Physiology
The Universal Sounds
The Beliefs
Chapter Five: Mental Mapping..........................................95
Chapter Six: Holographic Dynamics ............................... 147
Chapter Seven: Objections .............................................. 159
Chapter Eight: Precision Persuasion Engineering™ ... 197
Glossary of NLP Terms ....................................................203
Addenda .............................................................................. I
READER TAKE NOTE!
While it may seem that some of the sentence structures in this book read as grammatically incorrect, they are written for a purpose, as NLP and grammar do not necessarily share the same structure.
# INTRODUCTION
One Monday a few years ago, I woke up and decided that I
would go out that day and buy a new car. So I went.
I walked into a car dealership and stood there for about 10
minutes waiting to buy a car. It didn't appear to me that the sales-
man was very busy. He was on the phone. He was leaning back
with his feet up, cigarette in his hand, with a cup of coffee,
laughing and joking. It didn't look to me like he was talking with a
customer. I finally got his attention. I looked over at him and gave
him the "Are you going to come over and help me?" look. And he
gave me the "wait for me" signal. I walked out of the dealership.
I drove to a second car dealership, selling the same automo-
bile. I walked up to the salesman on the floor and I said, "How
would you like to sell a car today?" He said, "Sure." I described
the car to him and I said, "Here's what I want. Here's the exact car
I want. You have one out in the parking lot. I saw it before I came
in. Here's what I need to know from you. I want to know the best
price - I'm not going to argue about price. I need the best price and
I want the keys to the car because I want to test drive the car."
And he said, "Well, that's not the car you want. It's not you." I, of
course looked out at the car and agreed to myself that it wasn't me
because it was there and I was here. After a brief pause, I said,
"Yes, that's the car I want." And he said, "No, it
viii PERSUASION ENGINEERING'
isn't." And I said, "Of course, it is!" And he said, "No, it isn't."
And I said, "Yes, it is!" And he said, "You're not listening to me."
So I agreed with him, "You're right!" and 1 left the dealership.
I went into the next car dealership, the third one in the same
day, same kind of car. I was really motivated to buy a car that day.
I got somebody to take care of me in a short period of time (about
5 minutes). A salesman came up to me and I said to him, "Want to
sell a car today?" And he said, "Sure." I said, "Here's how you can
do it: keys to the car; best price; no kidding. I've already shopped
around. This is the car I want and you have one out in the parking
lot, the color I want and everything." He said, "I have to tell you
about the options first." I said, "I'm not interested in the options.
This is exactly what I want. I've been shopping for months. I'm
done shopping. Now I want to buy." He said, "I can't sell you the
car until I show you the options." I told him I wasn't interested in
the options because I was putting my money under the hood. He
said, "The company insists that I can't sell you a car until I go over
the options with you. I said, "You're right. You can't sell me the
car!" And I left.
I drove to the fourth dealership. I guess you can imagine how I
felt, as a customer goes. The salesman looked up, his eyes got
wide as he studied me. It was about 4 in the afternoon. I walked in.
As the guy looked at me (with that "I've just about had it today"
look), I asked him, "Do you want to sell a car today?" He looked
at me and said, "I can see you've had a rough day." And I said,
"Yeah, and I've had it. You're the last guy that I'm going to talk to.
If you can't sell me the car I want, and I'm going to make it so easy
for you, I'm not going to buy this car. I'm going to buy some other
car somewhere else." He looked at me and he said, "What do I
have to do?" I said, "Get me the best price and the keys to the car.
We're not going to haggle. And we're not going to go back and
forth on this thing. You give me the best price you can.
■IW
INTRODUCTION--------------------------------------------------------------------------ix
We're not going to haggle by talking to the boss, talking to the
manager. You get one trip to the manager and come back with the
best price! I already know what the list price is. I know what you
bought it for. I know all that. Just give me the best price you can.
If it matches what I want, and if the car handles the way I want it
to, I'm going to buy the car - RIGHT NOW."
This guy is great! He turns around and says, "Here are the
keys." He says, "Take the car. Take it by yourself and feel free to
go on the highway with it. If it needs gas, put gas in it and bring
back the receipt. By the time you get back, I will have the best
price in the state for you." On my way out to test drive the car, I
said, "And the papers. You can draw them up right now." And
that's where I bought the car.
# CHAPTER ONE:
To BEGIN WITH
One of the best ways to know how best to engineer persuasion
is to first notice how you respond as a customer. You know, others
tell you to put yourself in the customer's shoes. Well, the problem
is, not everybody wants to wear someone else's shoes. So that
strategy isn't that great, as the saying goes. But when you're the
customer, notice the processes that occur and begin to build the
things into your selling model that you know work and begin to
build into that model the options and choice points that you may
need in order to redirect the process as it occurs. We call this part
of the generative change process.
There are some good strategies out there except for one thing:
they don't have the loop where the person continues to learn
throughout their lives. Just because they have a strategy that
works today, doesn't necessarily mean it will work tomorrow, or
even next year, as variables change in the environment. I know
companies that have come close to or even have failed because of
their inability to respond to the environment. Feedback is the
"breakfast of champions."
Just today, we got a call from a potential client who wants us
to come in to teach our selling skills to their sales people. And we
said to them, "What is it that your customers want or need? What
is it that your customers buy?" And they said, "What's the differ-
2 PERSUASION ENGINEERING'
ence? We're not that interested in what the customer wants. We're
interested in giving our sales people selling skills so they can sell
more of what we already have." And we said, "OK, we can do
that. And what is it that you're customers really want from you?
What is it that they buy from you? Is it your product? Your
service? What is the value to your customers?" Their response:
"We're not interested in that. We're interested in teaching our
people to get others to buy from us." They didn't care whether or
not the customer has the money. They just wanted us to teach their
people how to get money from them. They're still a potential client
of ours. I don't teach these skills if they have that kind of attitude
because the skills we teach are powerful and they work. You may
think, hey a buck's a buck, but with all the opportunities that are
out there, we get to pick and choose our customers most of the
time. We want to have customer satisfaction, not buyer's remorse.
One of the most important skills is to know the difference up front
because, how can you know what to do next if you don't even
know where you are, like driving to Boston. If you're driving from
San Francisco to Boston, how would you know where and when to
turn, unless you pay attention to what's in front of you and what's
going on around you.
When you're selling, we make the basic assumption that what
you sell is a quality product or service and that you back up that
product or service yourself. Just like anything else, when you
believe in it, you will sell it. We don't care if it's an idea, product,
service, or whatever. Strong beliefs are the second place to look.
We're going to cover some of the basics in this book as well as
some of the advanced skills that the best of the sales people we
have studied use every day. Some of the basic skills are still the
best, especially for the foundation of anything you want to accom-
plish. So, when we combine these foundational skills with some of
the up-to-date things we want you to use here, it's because we
To BEGIN WITH 3
continue to find them most useful.
How we've engineered influence helps us to use a lot of exam-
ples. You know, we can do more than one thing at a time and for
humans, sometimes that's difficult but I find that it's better for you
if you do it that way.
The other element that we are going to be covering here is that
this real sales course boils down to only a two step process. We
are going to stretch it out a little bit to cover the process from the
end to the beginning. But it boils down to when you really want to
sell something.
I have a good business associate who has a group of sales
people working for him, about 15, and we all got together one day
for an evening after a program. I noticed that a good percentage of
these men and women drove into the parking lot in some late
model rather high priced cars. I said to him, "Gee Bob, you really
pay your people pretty well. Either that, or they are really selling
their butts off." He said, "I don't pay them that well, as far as their
salaries are concerned. Some of them really work hard. They can't
afford these cars. But every time one of them buys one, I smile
because I know they are going to be the most motivated they can
be just to keep up with the payments. I like my sales people to be a
little hungry. There's nothing better to keep them moving." And
so, he considers them to be self motivated. Anytime one of them
starts to slack off a little, he asks them how the new car is.
What you do is you induce a wanton buying state and show
them the product. Now, I got this idea when I was treating clients,
because I did a lot of modeling in the field of psychotherapy,
before I stopped and said "What am I doing?"
So, I modeled therapists, and therapists are pretty good sales
people, especially the ones that were good. Guys like Milton
Erickson, who was a great hypnotist. Actually there is a salesman
4 PERSUASION ENGINEERING'
who is like Milton Erickson. His name was Ben Feldman and they
actually talked alike, had the same intonation pattern and it really
surprised me because when I first met Milton I thought he was the
weirdest thing on the earth. And, yet, he was so great because he
could get people to do just about anything. I mean he had them out
looking for Bojum trees in the desert. We would ask, "Why do you
do that with people, Milton?" "Just to find out if you can," he said.
"Just to find out if you can. Right!" I said.
And what surprised me was, first Milton was a cranky old guy
and he'd just sit there, and go into a deep trance. And when I met
Ben Feldman the thing was he had exactly the same tonality. Only,
he had this book that he brought around with him and when he
opened up to the first page, the first page was filled with money,
loosely shoved under plastic so when he opened it, it would kind
of come out and fly around. That was his step number one, get
attention. Then he'd turn the page and there was a picture right
there of Ernest Hemingway and he'd look at them and he'd go,
"Ernest Hemingway is dead!" Pretty direct, huh? And you know,
people would look down, and he goes, "And when Ernest
Hemingway died," and he'd turn the page, "he left his family
penniless, with nothing, out on the street, you know, with no life at
all. Now you have a family, and you could be dead! And so people
would go (ugh) and he would reach over and anchor that response.
So, what I want you to think about is, what is it that you sell?
What is it that you think you sell? Some responses I've gotten
include: "Career management for women." "We sell piece of
mind." "Nice furniture. Office furniture." "Support for managers
going through change." "Alternative health products." "Business
insurance." "New homes." "Advocacy." "Jobs. I sell people." (I
thought this was illegal). "Graphic solutions." "Financial services."
And then there is the ever popular response, "Myself"
To BEGIN WITH 5
(also illegal in most states in the U.S.).
And the list goes on and on like this. Put all that aside. If you
don't know what you really sell, you're wasting your time.
Take this as an example. We've conducted sales training
seminars for one of the larger new home builders. And in "the
recession" over the past few years, in one of those years they sold
a mountain of homes. Because they understand that they don't sell
homes. They sell feelings. They sell comfort. They sell value. They
sell safety. They sell security. They sell convenience. They sell
piece of mind. They sell, in some cases, life style. In other cases,
they sell school systems. They sell education and they sell
everything else, except houses. And they sold more homes that
year because they understand that all yon sell are feelings. Now,
how you get to those feelings, how you help the customer to feel
right about what it is that they want is one of the other skills we'll
get to.
The other thing now is whether you believe in what you sell.
Do you believe in your product or service?
The thing is that, somebody once asked me, they said "isn't
NLP manipulative?" and I said, "Yeah, of course it is." I said, "But,
if you are going to force somebody to do something you use the
pistol training model, it works much better." The idea is, you don't
use conviction as a way of manipulating somebody. What you do
is, you open up the channels and make it so that you can get
people's natural processes to work for you. Anybody who sells
something that they don't believe in, is only going to hurt them-
selves in the end. They are not going to do that well. They may do
well for a while, and feel clever. But then they will find them-
selves, worshipping volcanoes or some weird thing to make up for
it. You know, it happens. The trick is to find something that you
believe in. Because, to me, I believe that you need to have a foun-
dation of product knowledge, which means you have to know
6 PERSUASION ENGINEERING'
what you are doing. This is something that I would like to intro-
duce, especially into electronics stores. Places where they sell
computers, it would be nice if the salesperson knew how they
worked and what they did. It's recommended, that instead of
having to call some 800 number to find out how the things work
and wait in line and have someone speak to you in a foreign
language, it would be nice if some guy in the store could actually
show you how the products work.
I modeled the skills from these guys whose close ratio was
97% or higher, ouch! Now I wasn't sure if I wanted to do this pro-
ject. I had to think this through and I had to make sure I was ready
for this one. The thing these guys were great at is that you have to
be able to build in and inoculate people against buyer's remorse.
And you have to be somebody who never has to overcome
objections.
We've looked at many sales courses. There are those, of
course, selling the psychological approach, which, if you use, I'm
sure you could cut your sales in half, just like that. It's funny, they
hire us to increase their revenues. And then they spend this
enormous amount of time trying to prove that what they are doing
is great, but they are not happy with it. These are people who are
not congruent.
But basically the idea is, in most sales, most negotiations and
in most of the situations in which people do, what I call,
"Persuasion Engineering™," they teach people a canned ritual
approach. One approach, the trick is to use it with as many people
as possible. Now even if you do pretty well, you find a good
approach and your close ratio is pretty high, it still means the only
way that you can make more money is by prospecting more and by
spending more time. So if you are seeing a hundred people, and
you are closing thirty of them, then you need to see three hundred
to triple your income. Which means you need to prospect 300
To BEGIN WITH 7
people, 300% more, so usually, by the time yau hit 45 or 50, you
blow a fuse somewhere upstairs or in the arteries. So what happens
is, you have to work so hard you go into burn out stage and you
stop doing even what does work. The alternative is to do what I
call being a professional, which means that you learn to identify
external things and to adjust your behavior and go after the other
70%, and by the way for those of you who have been doing this for
a long time, it becomes fun again. Because what happens is that
anybody that you know, because all the salesman tell me all the
same thing: "If somebody walks in the door, I know whether I can
sell to them or not." And I say, "Well, if you know that what you
are going to do is not going to work, how come you don't do
something else?" They say, "Well there is nothing else that will
work, nothing on the face of the earth will ever work with these
people." Well, we ran a little experiment with this. I went down to
a furniture store, which is out by the side of the freeway, in
Louisiana, and I had these guys who had been working at this
place forever, and some of these guys were quite good at what they
did. People would walk in and they said they could sell them most
of the time and they would close the sale. However, over 70% of
the ones that walked in the door, they would go, "Oh, no! They are
not going to buy anything." And sure enough they couldn't sell
them anything. So I started taking those people, to find out. And I
found out I could sell stuff to them. It didn't even matter what! I
could sell them the guy's car out in the parking lot. If you adjust
your behavior, and I also found out, that if we actually just divided
them up right, so that this guy got these kind of people and these
guys got this kind of people, we could increase their close ratio,
just by tunneling through the right guy, cause they didn't all do the
same thing.
They didn't all talk the same way, they didn't all speak at the
same rate and they didn't all use the same kind of nonverbal
8 PERSUASION ENGINEERING'
communication. Now the trick here is to realize that what ever you
do right now, that works, you want to slice all of that off and know
that when you finish here, you will be able to do that. What you
are looking for are those clients. And we want to start out to create
a change in your mind and I want to use a reference point. I want
you to stop . . . and think about somebody that you have to
negotiate with, or you have to sell to, or a kind of person, that
when they walk in the door a voice inside your head goes, "Oh,
shit," something inside of you goes (Grrrrr) and for a moment
close your eyes and think of one of those people, because they are
going to be your reference point. You will know here when you've
learned something when you can close your eyes and imagine
them. And they look like food. That deep voice always helps,
when the client walks in and you look at them and you go, "Poor
soul."
Now in the middle of the time that I have developed this sales
training program, I actually developed it for a company and I went
around and I modeled it and different things. And I discovered that
there are different aspects of what it takes to be one of these
people that's just dynamite. I always try these models, I'm one of
these people that believes, and, in fact, when I left the "ivory
tower" I was criticized for getting my hands dirty, because I liked
to take all the things that I thought about and used them to make
sure they worked. And my colleagues at the time thought that was
disgusting. They considered that as getting your hands dirty. They
are the kind of people that with pride say give me a button and I
won't push it. Of course, they don't make that much money and
they live in the ivory tower. They are living in think tanks right
now, most of them. You'd think, think tanks would be full of
wonderful things to think about, however, they're not, they're
empty. I know, they tried to get me to go in them. They brought
me up there and there was just a big empty building with people
To BEGIN WITH 9
doing this. And I know they couldn't be thinking about much,
because if they were they would be doing this. I know what hap-
pened is they went inside, they found the slide pictures, stepped
inside it and were frozen in time. And I actually got to go to some
of these conferences they had up there and we discussed issues
and most of the time it was stuff like the shape of the table. Their
ability to find things that were relevant were so far removed, that
when we had luncheons, I could steal all of their food and they
wouldn't know it. I would. I would go home with all of their food,
you know, and then after lunch they would all be going "I'm so
full." But I'd ask them questions, like, "How did you get started
here?" And when they'd go inside, I'd go (Fsht), now, I can see,
why I bothered.
And what we are going to do here, has to do with increasing
two things. One, I found that every good person who engineered
influence had first a road map, they had a way of knowing where
to start, and a way of knowing when they were done. Which is
particularly important, and had some kind steps along the way so
that they changed from doing one kind of behavior to another.
Some of them, you see most of them, spend a very short amount
of time, getting people's attention, because most of these people
were fairly outlandish. You know, it went from Ben Feldman with
his book with all the money in it to one of these other guys with
their 97% close ratio.
Selling ideas is one thing. Some of us sell products, some of us
services, some of us, get to negotiate.
This is a great thing. I got to negotiate, just me, against 16
lawyers at the publisher's. That's how I met Mosier. The publisher
decided they wanted to change the contents of his book and
Mosier was quite a stubborn old man, and he said there is no way I
am going to let you do that. And they told him he was under
contract and stuff and so they arranged a big meeting for him.
10 PERSUASION ENGINEERING1
And Mosier was on his way to New York to meet with them and
everybody was telling him he should get a lawyer and he stopped
at Chicago, cause one of his students had told him a little bit about
me and we had talked for about oh 25 hours and I looked over
some of the agreements. I flew to New York with him. And I
walked up and there was a table, a nice half round table with all of
these lawyers sitting there. The next day when somebody asked
them what happened, I believe the comment one of them made
was, "I have no idea." He said, "I went to shake the guy's hand, the
next thing I knew I was staring at my hand. And then there was a
pen in it." I am going to teach you that technique, too. That one is
designed for people that have fallen into a particular category
called "Dick Heads." When they line up to manipulate somebody,
suddenly you don't go into the subject matter, you go into an
unconscious state, where they can not interfere unhealth-fully. But
the majority of what we are going to deal with has to do with the
way people make decisions. If you know how people make
decisions, and you know what information to get, and you know
how they process information then whatever it is you are going to
tell them, you can package perfectly enough, that it will go
through that system so they can maximally understand it. It may
not still be perfect.
I have a friend who is a very very good real estate agent and I
was waiting for him in his office and he had some other guys who
worked for him and somebody came in and said, "Do you have
properties, in [a certain area] where the houses on that property
have a huge back yard?" And the guy looked down and he goes,
"Uh, well not right now." It's a very bad answer by the way, "not
right now." And the person turned away and started to walk out
the door and I said, "Excuse me." By the way, I wasn't a real estate
agent and I didn't work there. We were meeting to have lunch, but
it seemed like a rare and unprecedented opportunity to
To BEGIN WITH 11
practice skills that I didn't have. And I said, "Let me ask you a
question," I said, "What are you going to do with a big back yard?"
And the woman turned around and said, "Well I have nine chil-
dren?" And I said, "Oh, you have nine children and you really like
to pay taxes." And she said, "Well I have nine children." (In the
U.S. that means you don't pay a lot of taxes, by the way.) And I
said, "Well, I didn't mean that kind of taxes, I mean property
taxes." And she said, "I don't understand," I said, "Well the more
land you have the more property taxes you pay." And then in the
area they were talking about they charge by the inch. So I said to
her, I said, "Let me see." And I turned to him and I said, "Do you
have any properties that back up to a school?" and he said, "Oh,
yeah." And I said, "Why don't you get a house and let the school
mow the lawn and your children can play in it. Wouldn't that be
easier or do you like mowing lawns? How old are your children?
Old enough to do all the work and pay the taxes?" And she said,
"Well gee I never thought of that." Now the difference is, when
people tell you the result they want, a lot of times they tell you
how to get it, not what the result is.
Now when I went down to my friend who had the Mercedes
lot I said I need a new hobby, I said, "I have several other hobbies,
but I need a new hobby, so what I'd like to do is come down a cou-
ple of days a week and sell cars." And he looked at me and he
went, "What are you talking about?" And I said, "Well I built this
model and I'd like to try it out." Now this was, by the way, in the
middle of the oil embargo, this is when the only kind of car that
you could sell was one that you could put in your pocket. Right,
people were buying these little Toyota Corollas, little tiny things
and that's when you went (nnnnn). It's not like they are now,
where the big tough cars of those days, they were like you know
the only thing was they got was a lot of gas mileage but that's
because half the time you had your foot outside the door. And he
12 PERSUASION ENGINEERING'
told me, "You could come down here," he said, "but we didn't sell
a car in the last three months," and he said, "I think you're wasting
your time." And I said, "Oh, that's what makes it fun." Because
every time I found a really professional engineer of influence, the
one thing they've had as a solid belief is that challenge is exciting
and that's where you get to learn new skills. It's not like, "Grrrrr,
it's gonna be so haaard," or "But, I don't want to," "But it's too
expensive." They start sounding like dental drills.
So I went in and there were these four other salesman, and
they were depressed. They were sitting at their desks. I remember
the first day I went in because one guy who had his face down and
this other guy was chewing, he had a little piece of weed or
something. I thought, boy they're out there prospecting their asses
off, huh? So, I came in and I looked around and sure enough, they
weren't popping in going, "Gee, can I have a Mercedes?" You
know, because to begin with people are going, "the price of gas is
going up, DA DA, DA DA." So I asked him, I said, "Well you guys,
you're not really doing anything," I said, "Maybe you could
answer a few questions," I said, "How many cars do we have here
to sell today?" And they showed me the new cars and this is a
small town so they didn't have a lot, and I said, "Is this it?" I mean
they only had like twenty five cars and I had big plans. So this one
guy looks at me and he says, "I hate you young guys," he says,
"You think you can do anything," he says, "I've been a car sales-
man for thirty-five years and in the state of this economy and with
the oil crisis and for every commercial we could even show they
have news and everything saying you shouldn't buy a big gas guz-
zler," he said, "a Mercedes with a V8! What the hell makes you
think you can sell one of these?" And I said, "Are you a bettin'
man? Let's put something on this, something humiliating." Well I
thought I might motivate them a little bit. So I said, "I'll tell you
what. I bet you my pants, against your pants that I can sell more
To BEGIN WITH 13
than one car by the end of the day, as long as someone can fill out
the paper work, no one showed me how to do that, yet, and I have
a phobia of it." I gave myself one and from out of this little
window, a female voice went, "I'll fill it out for you, especially if I
can see him with his pants off."
So I said, "Great!" I hopped into a 450 SLC Mercedes, top of
the line at that time, going for $35,000 now it goes for I don't
know a few zillion, I don't know what they go for. A beautiful
silver gray, brand new, it had that smell of a new car. And I drove
off the lot and drove away. Now, I came back about an hour and a
half later with four people in the car and each of them bought a
car. TWo of them had to order it because we didn't have the cars.
Alright, then I had the guy hand me his pants and he was sitting
there in his boxer shorts, really depressed. These other people are
in there filling out the forms and the lady's in there laughing her
ass off every once in a while and she comes over and looks out the
window and giggles. She knew that if those guys got out there and
did something it couldn't be as bad as it was. One of the guys
looks at me and he goes, "Where did you go?" and I went, "I went
to the country club." And he went, "What?" And I said, "I went to
the bar at the country club, there wasn't anybody here. And I just
drove up, I opened all four doors, I walked inside and I turned
around and I said, 'Can I have your attention everyone? Is there
anybody who wants to feel wonderful for the rest of their life?'" I
mean who is going to go, "Not me, I felt wonderful before. What I
need is a good case of depression."
Pretty soon I had them out there smelling the leather,
imagining what it would be like to "drive down the road and
knowing that when you buy a car like this you can't be stupid
enough to believe that the oil crisis will go on forever, but this
thing has a great big tank, it's got guts, it has a huge tank in it. You
may guzzle more gas, but you don't have to go as often. And
14 PERSUASION ENGINEERING
you know for a few bucks, we can put a reserve tank in the trunk,
too, if you want us to, and when you've had this car for a certain
number of years you can trade it in and get even a better car,
because it drops down in value a little bit but it comes back up, its'
done it for centuries. Unless you like spending $12,000 on a car
and then three years later having it be worth a dollar. Of course,
there is that other thing too, which is, you know, when you drive
up and your clients see you are successful and in a brand new car,
they know your business is going better than theirs and perhaps
you'll get more contracts. Of course you're not interested in such
things as that. The question is, how good do you want to feel?"
Now there are a few other tricks I know that helped us along
which I am going to teach you. But while they were doing this, I
suddenly stopped and I went, "Excuse me, I forgot to ask you.
Some of these people have cars. Do you take trade-ins?" The guy
said, "Of course we take trade-ins. He said, "We've got so many
trade-ins because you know what people trade in on a Mercedes?
An old Cadillac, an old Lincoln Continental!" He said, "Behind
that building over there is over a hundred Lincolns and Cadillacs,
ranging from fifteen to twenty years." And I said, "Can we sell
them?" And the guy said, "No, you can't sell them. Nobody will
buy them." And I said, "But are we allowed to sell them?" And he
said, "Yeah." And I said, "How much do they cost?" and the guy
gave me a list and I looked at it and I went, "Wow!" and he looked
at me and he said, "This is the middle of the oil crisis, you can't
sell a Cadillac." And I said, "Excuse me" and I went right out the
front door, across the street to the Toyota lot and stood on the side
walk. You can't walk on the pavement but I can stand on the side-
walk. And the salesman walks up and he's got this guy with him
and he starts showing him this car, and so I said to the guy who he
was selling the car to, I said, "Excuse me mister. You don't
To BEGIN WITH 15
have a family, do you?" and he said, "Well, yeah I do." And I said,
"Well then you don't like them, very much." And he said, "Well I
love my family." And I said, "Do you know what it takes to crush
one of these cars? Imagine, you're gonna save a little gas and your
son is in the back with his head smashed and his arms broken?" I
said, "You are going to feel like a heel, man." And he goes well,
"What can I do?" and I said, "Well you know what I'd do? What
I'd do is realize that for a fourth of the price of this car, you can
buy a used Lincoln, have $9000 left over to buy gas and parts and
it will have leather seats and power windows and if you get hit by
one of these you can scrape it off with a brillo pad."
I sold 120 cars in less than a month. I broke a record but it was
used cars. It didn't amount to that much. Except I could double the
price and still sell them. That's neat you know, the commission left
on the Mercedes at that point of time was nothing compared to
what I can make off of an old Cadillac. I sold everybody I knew
one. I bought one. I bought one and drove it for years. It was great,
I paid $2000 for a Lincoln Continental and I drove it for ten years.
And I was hit four times. And each time, all it took was a brillo
pad, because that big Lincoln bumper out there, you know, and
that Toyota . . . actually one time I wasn't even in the car. I was
parked and this guy came around the corner and BAP!!! hit the
trunk. His car flipped on top of mine. Alright, when I came out
they were just taking him away in the ambulance and I reached
over and went (Flip) like this and the car spun and fell on the
ground and the policeman said, "What the hell do you think you
are doing?" and I said, "Well I was just getting the dust off my car
so I could go home." That's a good selling point for a car when
you can wipe other cars off of it.
Now, to me the major thing was, that my view point was that:
what I was looking at, other people weren't looking at, at that
moment in time. Now, they were trying to save a few bucks so the
16 PERSUASION ENGINEERING1
question is, for how long? Because when you change the length of
time you think about things, you start to add other dimensions.
When people negotiate . . . As a matter of fact, I was used as
an arbitrator several times. And most of the time I found that the
problem wasn't that either side couldn't give up or couldn't give
this. It's that neither side was asking for enough. Because when
you expand what both sides asking for, it gives you a wider range
to negotiate, as long as they understand what the end result is.
The National Association of Respiratory Therapists hired me
because at one point in time there was a great schism in their com-
munity and I mean they were just going all out. These were the
people that have breathing drug machines. It started out, doctors
had some people and these machines take a long time to run so
they taught these people to run them and pretty soon it became a
whole field and they had junior college courses that went on for
two years and you got a license. But, then there was another one
that went on for one year that got a license and then there were all
these people that learned from the doctors that didn't have a
license, and they had a national organization and they were ripping
it apart trying to decide what were they going to do. Should it be a
two year program, should it be a four year program, should we cut
off all the people that learned to do from practical skill, should we
grandfather them? Oh my God, let's hate each other, and they
attacked one another. Now, I went in the night before and I had
them each write up a proposal for what it was that they wanted.
And I changed one word. One word in both proposals and kind of
shuffled them together because they pretty much said the same
thing. The word is desirable. And I read it out loud and said, " Is
there anybody here, that disagrees with this?" And nobody raised
their hand. So before we even started, see usually it takes time to
negotiate something, this took thirty-two minutes to read the thing
and say "Hello" and ask the question and I said,
To BEGIN WITH 17
"So there is no conflict." They all looked at each other, here these
people have been fighting for five years, they agreed with one
another.
It sounds like marriage doesn't it. I always loved that, when I
hear that, his wife turns around and says to her husband, "You're
only trying to do that to make me feel good." You've all heard it
too, haven't you? It's just that thing that when you get into a cer-
tain state, you don't have the flexibility to do the things that you
want. So number one is having a road map, number two then
becomes having a set of beliefs that may or may not be true. But,
if you believe, you can sell to anyone. If you believe that challenge
is fun, and if you believe all you have to do is vary your behavior
in order to get the responses you want from other people you have
the foundation, you have the same foundation as people who are
closing at a 97% close ratio. All you have to do is learn to be a
little bit outlandish.
Now the next thing is, is that all of these people had intrinsic
sets of skills and knew when to use them.
What we have here is for you to use these things to engineer
your influence and build your business in ways that would
increase your earnings, your sales and your personal success and
well being. We want you to triple your income in less than half the
time and double that again. When you stop and consider that there
was a time when there once was no money, and look around you
now and see how much there is, that ought to be one reason to
understand that you don't have to work as hard as you've been
working to get better results.
More than anything else, this is an attitude. It's a way of life.
The most successful people are those people who truly "believe"
in what they do. Not that they just say they do. They have a
passion for what they do. They wouldn't trade their careers or
professions for anything else. They turn down get rich quick
18 PERSUASION ENGINEERING'
schemes. They focus on their own goals and they have the com-
petence as well as the confidence to achieve what they want. Their
attitude keeps them healthy, hungry and moving in the direction
that has them achieve their own desires effortlessly. They believe
in what they are doing. They are congruent in what they say and
how they behave in support of what they say. You have to be
congruent.
pp
• CHAPTER TWO:
THE SELLING PROCESS
When you look at the selling process, we like to start from the
end. Many sales training programs start with the beginning of the
process. After all, when you know where you're going, it's much
easier to get there. Then you run the process backwards for
yourself so you know what steps you take to get there. And the
steps are general enough to give you the flexibility to make the
changes you'll need to make for each situation.
Take this for example. No matter what you thought you sold,
you sell feelings. Period. Those feelings are trance-lated by your
customers. And each one of them will do it differently. This you
can take to the bank. So you first want to find out what the feeling
is they want and how they interpret this with their language, both
verbal and nonverbal. Then, you take them there.
There is this one case that we stumbled upon accidentally.
There was this couple who was buying a new home. He was
being transferred by his company and she had to relocate with
him. This is a very common situation. We are also seeing the
opposite.
Now the saleswoman was about to show the couple the home.
They already met and went over the particulars. But she also
knew of the wife's reluctance to move anywhere. Now this is
what I call "lucky." As they approached the home, they walked
20 PERSUASION ENGINEERING1
up the front walkway. She opened the first door and the wife says,
"Wait!" This is where the salesperson usually says to themselves,
"Oh, No. Now what?" But the wife says, "Open that door again."
The saleswoman did the smartest thing she could have done at that
moment. She closed the door and opened it! Imagine that! She
didn't ask why; she didn't ask what for. She closed the door and
opened it again. The wife looks at her husband and says, "It
squeaks just like our door at home." The saleswoman started mak-
ing excuses when the client said, "I already feel at home here.
Let's buy this one." This is the greatest, and almost shortest sale of
this magnitude that I know of. This is a great example of how
simple the sale is sometimes. The saleswoman probably would not
have elicited this information from the customer, but the infor-
mation also was probably there somewhere during the interview.
We don't really know. But the fact is, that the sound of the front
door opening made her feel at home. Any professional salesperson
on the planet has to go "Wow!" I call this "very luckyl" Of course,
I consider luck to be the combination of fine skills and the ability
to recognize opportunity when it's knocking and do something
with it.
Now the selling process includes some of your own content.
That's the specific context related material of your business. If you
sell cars, be able to provide congruent information about the car. It
does help to know the horsepower, etc.
Now the process begins with rapport. This subject is still over
taught. The essence of rapport is that it is a state of mind that
begins with kinesthetics. Sure, you can body match, match
breathing and all that. You don't have to spend three days body
matching to get rapport. You pace then lead. Pace, pace pace,
pace, pace, pace pace just isn't going to do it. Remember the
objective is to be able to influence the situation. Keep that in
mind. When people teach pacing for three, even four days, it says
THE SELLING PROCESS 21
something about the ability of the person to notice what's going on
around them. I mean, what does it take to look at the customer and
match their posture? It requires a simple, yet, somewhat seemingly
elusive skill. It's basic. It's simple. It's: open your eyes and your
ears and all your senses and notice what's going on around you.
Your customer, or your client, has all the information you need to
help them. They will give it to you. You don't have to go inside
your head to figure out what's going on. If you do, you just made
the second fatal mistake of any professional communicator. Not
only will they tell you and show you what's going on inside their
head, they'll even give you the solution opportunities they need. If
you know where you're going, and you know what's there, you'll
know what's missing. If you go inside your own head, you'll miss
something outside. And believe me, there's a lot to miss if you're
not there at the party.
So the process of rapport is important but we're not going to
spend a lot of time on it. Any matching you do needs to be tested
ASAP and regularly. Like driving your car. You drive down the
highway. You make sure it's between the lines. Then what, you go
to sleep? I don't think so. You make sure you keep it between the
lines. And you adjust. Constantly. The most important thing to
remember is that if rapport gets broken you reestablish it -quickly
- whatever it takes. The best way to keep rapport going is that you
must demonstrate understanding. Let me repeat that -
DEMONSTRATE UNDERSTANDING. That means behaviorally.
Saying, "I understand" isn't enough and it can even sometimes
work against you because it could be insulting to the customer.
Demonstrate understanding behaviorally.
I like to tell people that because salespeople already have a lot
to overcome, and much of it is undeserved in many places. It's like
consultants. Many people think and say that consultants are the
people who come into your company and tell you what you
22 PERSUASION ENGINEERING
already know and charge you for it. Well, that's not necessarily
true, although we have seen it in many cases.
I had a guy call me one day to ask me to pitch him for a sem-
inar we were conducting the following day. He didn't outright ask
that way. He called and asked, "Is this the place that's conducting
the seminar tomorrow?" I, of course said, "Yes." He then said,
"Well, why should I come to your seminar?" I had a number of
choices at this point in time and decided to conduct another of my
experiments. I said, "You shouldn't." I wanted to again test the
generalization that most people don't do their shoulds but they do
their shouldn'ts. He responded, "Then why not?" Then I told him
that he would show up, join the seminar, learn lots of great things,
use them, watch his life turn in the right direction and be more
successful than he's ever been. He goes, "Fine! Then I'll see you
tomorrow." And he did.
Sales people don't have the right to sell something just because
they're there. You earn the right to influence someone. You can
earn it quickly and precisely. Just like the therapy business, your
customers pay you to help them get what they want so they can
feel good. They don't pay for you to feel good. You get to do that
anyway.
So, you earn the right to influence. Then you move on in the
process and keep it going.
The most successful salespeople that we know store their sell-
ing experiences, both successful and otherwise, in such a way that
what you do is set up resource files in your mind because all
experience is useful in some given context. What works today may
not work tomorrow and what didn't work today may work
tomorrow. You never know what may work. Remember, your
customer will always communicate what's going on and what the
solution opportunities are. You may be surprised at what works
and when.
THE SELLING PROCESS 23
Another of the important things you can learn about the selling
process isn't only to make the right choice at the choice point, but
when, to make it, especially since time and space are relative.
When you do the exercises, that we provide, to build more
behavioral flexibility into your communicating process, you begin
to reinforce your understanding of language processing and using
it more fully. We find that most people who need more options in
their lives also need more flexibility in their language and voice
qualities as well. You can call it what you want, if you can't say it
well, you can't do it well. Build on top of that the auditory qualities
of a champion and Zing! you've got your winning combination!
» CHAPTER THREE:
THE BASIC STUFF
We're going to touch on what some of the basics are for those
of you who are novices to NLP. For those of you who consider
yourselves to be veterans in the field, you may, of course skip this
section, but then you'll never know what you missed because the
ways I've learned what I've learned is to continue to be unrea-
sonably curious about what others are doing in business, in sales,
in marketing, especially the most successful people out there.
So there are skills for example, in NLP they teach you about
pacing. And things like, you know, you can breathe at the same
rate as someone, you can speak at the same rate they speak. If you
have somebody who thinks primarily in visual images, you can
describe things to them in visual images. But you see there is a
time and a place to use that. And there are times and places not to;
and knowing which are which is based on your ability to see and
hear things on the outside.
What makes the difference in the rapport process is under-
standing the directions people move in. Since a decision is a
nominalization, it is relatively stationary. Turning this event into a
process, we need to consider whether or not it will move towards
being executed, or will it be "put aside." That's most of the
problem with decision making. Many decisions are made and are
lackluster to being executed. Listening to the sentence struc-
26 PERSUASION ENGINEERING1
ture of the whole representation of the process will help you
understand whether or not the decision will be executed.
Remember, one of the more important things in the choice point is
when.
How and when people move in directions and in which direc-
tion is very useful information. Now let's back up a little. One of
the reasons why we point this direction thing out is because of the
way people will respond to different stimuli. The towards and
away-from sorting pattern is one to learn about and so is how to
use it in a three dimensional model. Now, run through this the
element that the brain likes what's the same, and learns by noticing
what's different, it's what I like to call the "push-pull" element.
We teach you, for example, that speaking to a rhythm will tend
to build a rhythm for the listener. As choice points for the com-
municators, when you interrupt the rhythm momentarily you open
the opportunity to embed another structure, then slide back into
the rhythm again. This particular demonstration of rapport through
sameness is the one we want you to understand here. Sure, body
matching is a neat visual demonstration, but it's not necessarily the
most useful. Because there are so many people who have learned
about this by now it sort of turns into the old "who's matching who
game." We don't recommend this for success.
I remember once where I met with these three managers from
the same company. We were going in to sell them our services.
They all had done their research on NLP (or what they thought
was NLP) and "had all the answers" about what the consultant
should be able to do. One of them even tipped his hat when he told
me that they had interviewed another consultant who "did" NLP
and didn't walk his talk. He didn't even bother to demonstrate to
them that he understood what they wanted. They told
THE BASIC STUFF 27
this guy what they wanted and he told them that it wasn't. That he
had even better stuff than that.
So I meet with these three guys. When we first met, I looked at
the first one, a young guy with very expensive clothes, Italian silk
suit and tie and really expensive boots. I walked up to him,
introduced myself and said, "Wow, Bill. Great suit. Italian silk,
isn't it?" He smiled, looked at his suit and said, "Yeah, thanks!" He
was easy, but I wanted to get one in the bank early. I met the
others and we went into their meeting room. I noticed that one of
them, the prime decision maker, by the way, appeared to me to be
going out of his way to mismatch my body posture. He was really
creative, too. So I asked him a question about the training he
wanted and he spoke for about a minute, or so. I then looked at the
others and spoke to them. I used his voice tone, tempo, rhythm,
inflections, etc. while speaking to them. I didn't even bother to
look at him. After a few minutes I did the obligatory rapport check,
I touched my cheek, and I saw him touch his out in my peripheral
vision. I paused, turned my head and smiled. He laughed and said,
"Wow, how did you do that?" I told him we teach it in the sales
program. He laughed and asked again. Interestingly enough, he
appreciated the idea that I could be as tenacious as he could, he
gave us the contract. Interesting match, I'd say. You see, the
communication processes that do occur can be redirected easily.
We tend to learn through difference, even though we tend to like
what's the same. Get their attention first. Without it, they're
wasting your time.
When you talk to somebody, where you stand, how you move,
the tone you use, every nuance of communication becomes vital,
because it influences a particular process. And it's the process by
which people make the decision whether or not to buy something.
Or whether or not to change a belief about something. Because
some people sell ideas, like those people that come to your house
28 PERSUASION ENGINEERING'
on Sunday morning, or worse on Saturday morning. The ones that
come by with the comic books, they scare me, people like that,
because they come by and they go, "Have you accepted Jesus as
your personal savior?" And I go, "No, not today." They go, "Why
not?" and I go, "Because I'm Jewish. And we are still waiting. We
are sure there is a Messiah coming, we just don't think it was him.
But it's okay if you want to think it's him, as long as you don't
think it's him on my doorstep at six in the morning." Then I found
one of the ways of convincing them to leave is to take your clothes
off.
After all, think about it, some people get confused because
when they build convictions or beliefs they build them so that if
any other ideas are around it they can't detect it. They simply
delete it. Now this is what happens when people come in, because
I have people that come in and they said to me, "Well you know, I
want to buy a station wagon." At that time Mercedes didn't make a
station wagon. And I look at him, and I go, "No you don't." And
they go, "Yeah, yeah I have to have a station wagon." And I go,
"No you don't." Now, that's not pacing is it? See these NLP people
get really stuck on it. It goes pace, pace lead lead lead. It's not pace
pace pace pace pace pace pace pace get frustrated, to self
criticism.
The representational systems are the first choice of successful
communicators. Actually paying attention to anything in the
process is a good start One of the easiest ways to begin influence
is to pay attention to the representational systems of the customer.
They can change with context so, once you have their attention,
pay attention to what they are doing while they're saying what.
I have some friends who own a stereo business and while I
was in there one day they asked me if I could give them some sell-
ing ideas. They were working on my car and so I said, "Sure."
They had a guy who really knows his stuff technically but it
THE BASIC STUFF 29
seemed that he couldn't get enough sales. He was a really nice guy
. . . but . . . they weren't paying him to be a nice guy, they were
paying to get results.
Well, I went into the selling area and he really did know his
stereos and sound systems. He could rattle off specifications and
all kinds of things for the customers and they weren't listening to
him. They would come in and say, "I want to look at some stere-
os." This guy would respond by saying something like "Well, this
one here has really good sound, blah blah blah hear it blah blah
blah, etc." Pretty simple. The customers would even say things
like "This looks like it sounds really good." I don't know about you
but this seems like an opening opportunity to me. A lot of these
people were basing their primary decision criteria on how it looksl
They want blinking lights, brushed chrome on black panels and
lots of neat-looking dials. Imagine that stereo companies even
built "graphic equalizers" so people could see what it sounds likel
Take these cues as they are presented. I even have some friends
who have said to me, "Hey, have you seen my new stereo? Let me
show it to you." This guy has seen the benefits is now selling
stereos like there's no tomorrow.
Track the sequence of the rep systems from the beginning. We
receive information in all the senses: we see, hear, feel, smell, and
taste. We process the information, we store it, we retrieve it, we
reprocess it: we see it, hear it, feel it, smell it, taste it, or some
combination of these; then rerepresent it and then communicate it.
Do you see what I'm saying? Getting a handle on it? Grasping it?
Can you feel what I'm saying? Because that is the way that people
will communicate. And, of course, there are unspecified words
like manage, decide, know, etc.
So, what happens is, many people get caught up in their own
learned patterns. They may go, "See this, see that", visual, visual,
visual. The other person person is saying, "Talk to me. Talk to
30 PERSUASION ENGINEERING'
me. Tell me more." And then we want to show them
things? They don't want to be shown things. They want to
hear about them. It's a mismatch in communication. Now,
because you have choices in your communication you can
communicate the same idea in all rep systems. It's very
possible to do that. Does this look interesting? Does it
sound like something you would like to pursue further?
Perhaps get a little bit more of a handle on it? Can you see
how subtleties like this can have you enjoy the sweet smell
of success? Again, these are very basic skills.
Pay attention to how the other person communicates
because that's how they communicate. People will ask us
how do they know what rep system the other person is
using. Our reply: "Open your eyes and ears and all your
senses and pay attention to what's going on."
Just paying attention will get you a lot of information.
Most people really know what they want when they want
it. They may not know how to get it in the best way. The
selling process is only one of two things: either they pretty
much know what they want, or they don't. When they do
know, you give it to them. When they don't, you teach
them how to buy it.
You'll remember about eye accessing cues. This was a
really great discovery since it went unnoticed for years.
Well, it's still good information about where someone's
eyes move when they're accessing information and vali-
dating the congruence of their communication but it's not
nearly as valuable as noticing where they move their eyes
to after they have the information.
For example, think about something that you believe
without a doubt. Like, do believe that's it's important to
THE BASIC STUFF 31
breath? Now where did your eyes move to in order to retrieve the
information? And now where is the information? In front of you
and down right or higher, for example? Ask this question of others
and notice what you get as a response. Notice if they first
remember the information (eye access up and left, for example),
then where do they place the picture! This is very valuable infor-
mation. Of course, it does require that you see it first. When you
see it, you can use it.
Resourcefulness is a valuable choice for life. So, to begin with,
there're some things you need to do with yourself first. I mean, if
you wake up in the morning and go, "Oh, no, not another day at
work (grrr)", that's not going to work real well. Get started right.
Because the other foundation that we are going to have to build
in this area is that nothing of what we will teach you will work if
you don't internally make of yourself something which is more
powerful. And I mean more powerful than you were the day
before. You need to start each day by making yourself more pow-
erful, more motivated. I wake up in the morning and I open the
drapes and look at all the buildings full of money out there. And I
say to myself, "Ahhh, I want it." I look at the telephone . . . you
know some people who did telemarketing have phobias about cold
calling. Not a good combo. And I ask them, "How many calls do
you make a day?" And they all go, "Well, I don't know, six." And I
go, "Six? You know, I make six before I get out of bed." And I
don't even have anything to cold call about. I just do that to
practice. I call up and go, "Do you like diamonds?" And they go,
"Who is this?" And I go, "It's not important. Just wanted to know
if you like big diamonds." And they go, "Are you one of my
relatives?" And I go, "No, I just wanted to know if you like big
diamonds." And they go, "Yeah" and I go, "Is your husband
around?" And they go, "Yeah." And I go, "How would you like to
be able to get him to want to buy you a big a diamond?" And they
32 PERSUASION ENGINEERING™
go, "Well, I don't think I can get him to do that." And I said, "I
don't think you could either . . . without my help, of course. But
you do deserve it, don't you?"
Wouldn't it be something that would be there for the rest of
your life? Wouldn't it be nice to have something that you could
look at everyday that made your soul reverberate with pleasure?
You see, your ability to change your tonality and your belief sys-
tem and to have fun . . . what a great profession.
Now, let me ask you to do the following thing because the
answer to what we want to learn is, of all places, inside your head.
Because we, as sales people, are the most powerful consumers of
all. We can't help ourselves. We order out of catalogs, from tele-
vision. We love sales because we love buying. Own up to it. We
are the best ones of all. As soon as we get a buck in our pocket, we
are out there looking at whatever trinket we can find. We are like
pro's. If it shines, we'll look at it. And then we'll consider, "Maybe
we can sell that, too." That's why some of us float from selling one
thing to another to another, we just like the activity. When you do
it well, isn't it as good as sex? Well, almost.
Hey when I was single, I met a lot of people selling Mercedes
and old Cadillacs. Sometimes now, I just walk in the store and sell
things even if I don't work there. Just for the hell of it. I wonder, I
ask myself, "Can I sell that stuff?" And I look at that exercise
equipment and I think, "God, it amazes me, people actually buy
this stuff. I got to go in, and see how do you sell this stuff?" And
the next thing I know I have exercise equipment all through my
house. I am very convincing.
Now, Let me ask you to do the following, I want you to think
of an example of each of these things. First one and then the other.
First, I want you to think of something where you walked in, you
looked at it, you absolutely had to have it, you bought it and you're
delighted with it? Okay. Then, after you think about
THE BASIC STUFF 33
that, then I want you to stop . . . and I want you to think about
something where you went in and you knew you wanted it, and
you knew it was the perfect thing and you didn't buy it.
Okay, now when you do this, I want you to look at one in your
mind . . . now look at the other. I'm going to ask you the question:
Are the pictures in the same place in your mind? Physically
located? I am going to ask you are they the same size? Are they
both color or black and white or is there a difference: is one a
movie and one a slide or are they both slides or both movies? Is
the sound the same? Is the size of the images the same? Or as you
go back and forth in your mind is there a lot of differences
between these two things?
DEMONSTRATION
Okay, Peter, I see your nodding. Is there a difference? They
are both in the same place? Just start at the beginning here, Peter,
we'll inch our way along. Okay, now, if you guys could watch,
come up here, Peter, you've got to come up here, they've got to see
this, this is too good. Now, the stuff that we told you about access-
ing cues, some of you know about and some of you haven't. Let
me just run you through this. When people make pictures in their
mind, when people make images, they have a tendency, first to
have to get the image, they have to move their eyes to get the
image and then they look at where it is. So you know, when, for
example Peter, what was the first one, what did you buy? "A tape
recorder." A tape recorder. Okay, I got it. And the thing that you
didn't buy, what was that? "A car." It was a car. Now, can you
guys see these images are not in the same place? The image of the
tape recorder is on the right and image of the car is on the left.
Now let me tell you something. This is a big thing that sales
people do, which manages to decrease their income profoundly
(for those of you who want to get poor.) They have a tendency to
34 PERSUASION ENGINEERING'
walk around in these images. They get in peoples' faces, and talk
to them and they can't see a thing. Cause remember, we know
there are some differences, we know that number one, we don't
want images over here (gesturing over to the left) do we? We want
them over there (gesturing to the right) don't we? Cause that's
where he buys them. We also know, as he said, that there is a cer-
tain intensity of color. Which one is closer, by the way? Big sur-
prise! (as he points to the one he bought). Now did he just show us
how much closer? Thank you Peter. Now, when you think about
this car and you didn't buy it, that's because it wasn't the "right"
thing, you know. That's right.
Now let's take this image of the car, just for the sake of things.
What I want you to do is bring it around over here (to where the
tape recorder image is) and move it up and change the intensity of
the color. (Richard anchors the response) That was subtle. I like
the way . . . "damn he anchored him on the shoulder, see that hand
up there?" We do recommend that you do notice these things. But
we recommend you're slightly more subtle than that. Do you see
what I am saying?
So anyway, I have this old Cadillac, Peter. And I just want you
to take a look at it. It's just a 1974 Cadillac but, see what I mean
vrrm. There's no car and he's ready to buy it. Look at his face: he's
thrilled. And the only thing is that it has a jet engine on it. Well,
Richard likes to go very, very, very fast. That way, when I am
chased by the police I can out run them. Then wings pop out the
side, and you take off. So, they watch you sail away and they go,
what was that? Right, and then you have a loud speaker out of the
back: "UFO." That's what I am going to sell next year is UFO's.
Hum, want to go for a ride on a UFO? Peter, don't you think it
would be useful, don't you? Wow. Wow, that would be great! All
you have to do is invest a little right now. Yeah yeah. Thank you
Peter, you can sit down. (End of demonstration).
THE BASIC STUFF 35
Now. The other piece in this. One piece has to do with know-
ing how people make decisions in their mind and being able to
make it work within those things. The last piece we are going to
work with here, is that all of you need to learn to increase your
own enthusiasm. One of the things about selling and negotiating,
in fact, one of the things about life is that, if you don't make things
more exciting, they get duller. This is true about people, it's true
about things, it's true about everything. You need to be able to
create an internal state which makes the activity itself wonderful.
You need, for example, to be able to move through the world with
no fear. Only excitement!! You need to look at the activity the way
you would a great meal. See I know people who look at the people
who come in and they go in and they go, "Oh, shit." And they
come up and they go, "Can I help you?" (muffled) People go, "Get
away from me!" You need to be able to walk up to that person and
say, "Excuse me, sir, but you are in the wrong aisle." And they
say, "How do you know that?" "Because these are not worthy of
you. This stuff is junk. You look like somebody who wants to
have quality in their life." Who's gonna say, "Not me, I want
garbage in my life"? I'll tell you about this rhetorical question
thing, because one of the things that you want to do, is always
remember the entire communication, you want to keep people in
the state of answering, yes. Constantly. You want them to feel yes,
in every fiber of their soul. The other thing that you want to do is
to make sure that the activity is enjoyable, because you have to
create a great internal state in yourself so that you can create one
in them. Because you need to create a state that's dynamic, that
feels better than anything else. Because it's not that people couldn't
buy products through the mail, that you could just send everybody
catalogs and they could just look it up. You know, they are trying
this over the telephone, now everybody has their modem, and is
going to go shopping. You know what? They have
36 PERSUASION ENGINEERING'
to still put sales people at the other end. Even if they are simulated
ones.
Without salespeople you cannot induce the response that it
takes to attach to a product to make it powerful enough that you
can get people to respond. Because the important thing that you
sell with every product or every service is that every time they
look at it or think about it they should feel good. No matter what.
This is what you do for a living. You make sure that decisions are
permanent, that decisions make them feel good and the other thing
that I require is that they bring twenty clients within the next six
months. Or feel bad. Actually, I make it so that they want to come
back so much, that they are always dragging people over. I make
is so that they have an intense feeling inside of them, that makes
them want to do that. Cause I think it's part of what you get, it's
part of your commission, is that you spend a lot less time
prospecting.
Now, there are different kinds of engineering. Some of you are
probably managers, in which case you don't have to get them to
bring you new people. They are there already. But there are parts
of this process that are going to apply to all of you. And I want to
start by having you do something which is the most important
thing of all, which is begin to turn your own internal state on as an
asset so that when you get up in the morning and when you get in
your car and you drive, and when you walk in there, (I don't care
what state you want to be in on the way there), when you walk in
the door, you should light up like a bulb. Now, if you are smart,
when the sun comes through your eyelids . . . That's the way I like
to do it because I like to launch into my day. The idea of waking
up and going "I don't want to get up." just doesn't strike me as a
good idea.
It seems like a waste of time to have to wait until you have to
urinate to get up. It seems to be the primary motivator on the
THE BASIC STUFF 37
planet right now. People wake up and go, "I don't want to get up, if
you don't get up, you'll be late (Bmmmf)." Painting pictures of
being late, feeling depressed and stuff. They go through this non-
sense and suddenly they have to pee so they get up. This doesn't
strike me as the best internal strategy. And probably the reason
things aren't as dynamic as they could be is because your own
internal states aren't as dynamic. So we are going to start out with
a little exercise. Exercise number one will give you not only some
more of the internal states that I think are really congruent with
having more flexibility, but it is also going to give you something
else. I want you to learn to watch the changes in peoples' faces, as
you induce them.
Now, those of you who have had NLP training before . . . for-
get it.
We don't do it that way. This way I don't want anybody
squinting to see responses. See, they do this NLP, I heard, and
people do this stuff: "Remember a time when you were real excit-
ed." They look and they look for minimal changes in lips and stuff.
Bullshit, okay? We are looking for ones where the whole person
just lights up like a neon light! If you don't see that, than you have
to change your behavior. The trick is you need to learn to be
congruent. That's when words and behavior match at the same
moment in time. When you ask somebody to think of a time, you
need to exude it. You can't go, "Well think of a time you were real
thrilled" And do it with a whiny voice tone. And I know when you
do this exercise I'm going to hear it. And when you feel the hand
hit you on the side of the head you will know why. I've discovered
if I hit them just hard enough the ideas will go in.
Now we are going to start with kinesthetic anchoring. But we
are going to move onto other kinds, because you can anchor in dif-
ferent ways, sometimes you touch people sometimes you don't.
You see, the funny thing is I noticed that therapists and people in
38 PERSUASION ENGINEERING'
the field of psychology only touch someone else only when they
first meet and when they are leaving. But when you walk into
offices, stores, or hardware stores there is always a guy who has
his hands on somebody from behind showing him something. So
don't tell me you don't touch people. Cause I know you do. It's just
that you do it without knowing about it. The trick is to do it at the
right time. And what we want to concentrate on here is to begin to
build some powerful states, so I want to show you a different kind
of anchoring. Alright now, what we are going to do is we are
going to make anchors, but the anchor we are going to make is one
which is called a sliding anchor, what we are going to do is keep
inducing more and more states in anchoring something by
distance. In other words, we are going to make a little mark and
then we are going to start at the beginning and go a little further
and then go a little bit further. You can do this with your hand in
the air or you can do this on people's skin. But you must be very
precise at the moment you do it or you can get all kinds of things
that you wouldn't know you get. I've had people say to me, "Well,
I am just sure I don't want to buy a Mercedes." And I say, "Are
you sure enough to be unsure?" And they say, "Yeah." And I say,
"Well then let's talk about it." Come with me. Okay, thank you
very much.
Now, I'll tell you what I want you to do, I want you to find
somebody out there that you don't know, it will be easier for you,
cause the people that you already know, you've already got a lot of
anchors with. I also want to make sure that you all have the ability
to walk up to strangers. If any of you find difficulty in doing that
it's because you're inside your head saying stupid things, like
(mumble and yah mrbr, well I jajajjaja) Just shut up!
I don't want anybody talking to themselves behind the other's
head unless they are saying things like "OOOOOOOOO," and if
you start to say that other stuff, go "Shut up!" and say
THE BASIC STUFF 39
"0000000000" and say it louder and then go "Ahhhhhhhhh".
Otherwise somebody will be there first. And you know what, if
you are always the second person to get the chance to sell some-
thing to somebody, and they always buy it from the first one then
you won't sell anything. In fact, you won't have anything except
regret. And then you will have to go to therapy for the rest of your
life. It's really not worth it so when it's time just get up and walk
over to someone. It will propel you forwards. Now when you get
there, what I want you to do is to build a powerful internal state.
Now there is a little chart in the back of this book about
anchoring that does it intellectually, but I want you to see what it
looks like with someone.
Sit down with someone and ask them to just close their eyes
for a minute. Now say to them "I want you to remember a time
where you were excited" . . . or "a time where you were
depressed" ... or "a time where you felt angry" ... or "a time where
you felt invincible" . . . or whatever it is. And let them remember
it. And I want you to see if you can notice any changes on their
face. Now when those things exude to the point where they are
maximally expressed, at that point in time, I am going to make a
little anchor. Touch them, or make a sound, a gesture, or word.
Now you have them think about something else. " I want you
to think about what you had for dinner last night." Notice the dif-
ference. You see, how does it feel that psychology missed this,
that's what I want to know, a rock and roll musician finds this
stuff. That's what I was doing at the time, I was playing the blues,
you know. And I would ask audiences I'd go, "Are you guys feel-
ing good?" And they would go, "Yeah!"
Now, go back and fire off the anchor for the person. Notice the
response come back. Now this is my basic sales program: Induce
good feeling; attach it to product. Or very importantly, you can
40 PERSUASION ENGINEERING'
also induce it and attach it to yourself, because you are a part of
this, especially if it is a service, because you, like me want the best
for yourself. You, like me want the best for yourself. Now this is a
language pattern and we are going to get into those. They're fun.
You need to have a state which has got motivation, you've got
to think of a time where you moved without hesitation. So what I
want you to do is to ask that person to find a time like that, some-
thing like when they looked down there was a hundred dollar bill
on the ground, right? Do you go, "Um don't touch that, you don't
know where it's been". Not likely! (Vttttt) Down you go and you
pick it up.
There are many other experiences where you move without
hesitation. Now, you also want to find one where you felt some-
what flirtatious because you always need to be able to when you
are doing sales or negotiating to be able to chide people from their
positions. You don't want to flirt with them and kiss them and that
kind of stuff. But one where you can just tease just enough and not
too much so that you can maneuver people around. Go back to
around when you were a teenager, you'll find a lot of this stuff.
Find a time when you were able to induce that state that makes
people feel a little giddy. Now, you want to find and for some of
you, I know this is going to be the tough one, a time where you
really had a good sense of humor. Okay, we're not talking lamp
shades on the head here. We're talking about when somebody said
something and something funny just pops into your head because
it is the part that allows you to see the world differently. It adds
flexibility. Then you want to find the time in your life where you
have had the biggest, most intense and ferocious state of all. The
time where you did something that not even you thought you
would do. And it was fun.
Now for each of these, what I want you to do with a partner
THE BASIC STUFF 41
is, I want you to have them think about it, see what they saw at the
time, hear what they heard, and I want you to be convincing. Think
of the time where you saw something and you knew you had to
have it, and there was not a bit of hesitation at all. Build it up and
as you build it up tell them to close their eyes, see what they saw
at the time, hear what they heard and as you see the changes come
up in their face I want you to mark it. Alright, now, then I want
you to induce the second state the same way, start at the
beginning, and layer it right over the top of the first one. What you
are going to make for them is an anchor where they can reach it.
To hell with this knee stuff they used to use. Put it somewhere
where they can reach, put it down on their arm or shoulder, so that,
if they reach over and fire off the anchor you are going to have all
these things come pouring in at one time. Make the anchor, test the
anchor, go to the next state, put it right over the top of the previous
one when you get it, and you'll get both. At the third one, do this,
so that internally you begin to build something and literally tell
them when you fire it off. Make that picture in their head bigger,
make it brighter, bring it up closer, have some real enthusiasm in
your voice you know, where it was REALLY INTENSE*.
Remember congruency is everything in our business.
Remember the degree to which you can become more congruent in
the way you do things is the degree to which your wealth increases
directly. Think about it, if you could increase your close ratio by
300%, what do you think would happen to your life? "Oh, I'd have
too much money and I would screw it all up and I would end up
becoming an alcoholic, a drug addict, and end up buying a fancy
sports car and killing myself. I'd just assume stay poor, thank you
very much." That's not why you are learning this. You are learning
this because you want more, because this isn't just about selling
products, this is about engineering influ-
42 PERSUASION ENGINEERING'
ence, about a lot of things, this is about getting a raise, this is
about closing contracts. This is about starting your own businesses
and I make that plural because I think now a days everybody must
have more than one business.
An idea came to me as I was driving down the coast of Kona,
and there it was: Mortuary and Donut Shop. And I thought, there
is a guy with flexibility of behavior, right in the same building.
Hey, if they could put those together, I figure you can put anything
together. You know you should be able have all kinds of things. A
place where you go in and buy software and underwear. Works for
me. Some people need both. I go downtown to buy software and
then I go, "Well, gee, you know, I wish there was a place close by
where I could get underwear." I would have gone into an
underwear store but there's no software there.
People tell me, "Well you know, we don't deal in that product."
Do you realize that's like saying "I don't want that money." And I
hear this constantly, I go in stores, I say, "Do you guys have video
tape machines?" and he goes, "No we don't sell those", while he
sweeps his hand across in front of him. They always make that
gesture. No, no, no, not interested in that money. To me, I would
go, "Just wait here." I'd look in the yellow pages and ask if I sell
one of these can I have 20%. You know, it would only take a
minute. "Oh no, you're not allowed to do that, excuse me, we don't
sell those here. It's not in our nature, we are genetically immune
from making this money." Uh mm.
See I'm willing to farm out anything. I'll be sitting in a store
sometimes and people walk up to me, I don't know maybe it's just
the way I look or something and that's because I watch them.
They'll walk up and they'll say, "Excuse me, I'm really interested
in this suit". And I go, "Wait here a minute." And I go to the man-
ager, "If I sell this $2000 suit, before I pick mine up can I have
20%?" And if they say no I say to the customer, "Get out!" They'll
THE BASIC STUFF 43
never tell me that again. I go, "How about this next guy coming
through the door? This could be a really bad day for you." Hey,
what if it takes three hours for them to finish my suit? Hmmmm
Hmmmmm.
Actually, there is a nice thing in San Francisco, this double
business thing. There at the place where I get my suits they put a
lunch counter in the middle of it. They serve fancy Italian food
and it's just smack in the middle of this clothing store for no rea-
son, no explanation, no nothing and you know, it's nice because
when you are waiting for things you can go in.
But sometimes, you find yourself going in for a $10 lunch and
coming out with a $2000 suit. And you ask yourself, "Well, I
didn't know that I was that hungry." But you are sitting there and
you pick up that menu and you go, "Yeah, that's what I want." And
you order it and there's the suit. Ummm. Not a bad idea if you can
get it in the right place. We could actually take a picture of them
with a computer, generate an image, and hand it to him and he
would be putty in our hands.
So to build up your attitude. Go find someone and do this.
We get a couple of interesting questions as we do seminars
around the world. We ask them, "Did you make the pictures in
your head and make them bigger and make them stronger and
access the memories?" And they say, "No". It's like anything else.
If you don't do things in your head to make your world more
dynamic, it won't be. It's like I always tell people, if you are look-
ing for what works, you'll find it and if you are looking for what
will go wrong you will find it, too. If the way that you organize the
world says that when people ask you to do things you don't do
them, the name of that is "just stubborn." And if you want to be
stubborn about making your life better, that is fine with me. In
fact, if you need help making it worse, I know how to do that, too.
You know, go inside access bad feelings, amplify them, loop
44 PERSUASION ENGINEERING'
them around, you know, and say to yourself, "Life is the pits, life
is the pits, life is the pits." And it will be.
I am going to want you to go back and we've got one more
piece of work we want to try here so that we can begin to open up
the doorway.
See, I decided, unlike most people who like to chunk real
small and spoon feed people, I like to chunk in great big pieces. I
like to get the big pieces and then I figure you can always clean up
the little ones. You guys can get a tape and learn language patterns
and spend a little time doing that. We'll even cover some of these
later in the book for you.
But if you can get the great big things about how the brain
processes information and about how decisions go on, then you're
much better. Whether it's a multimillion dollar contract or a can
opener, the process itself is very very much the same. I mean there
has to be certain things, certain pieces of information to get so that
in your mind you move around the pictures you want in a certain
way. Because I know that when I am buying something, it's very
easy.
Consider the following line from one of the largest stereo
chains in the world. And I walked in already wanting to buy
something. I knew exactly what I wanted and in one store the guy
convinced me not to buy it. I walked up and I looked at it and I
pointed to a digital auditory tape machine and I said, "I want that."
Now, I don't know about you guys, but that's where I figured you
don't need to get their attention. You've already got that, you don't
need any rapport at all. And you don't need any presentation.
Right? Not unless you really want to screw things up. All you need
to do is go, "Yes, sir." It seems like you are done. But this person
looked at me and they said, "Well today, let me be honest with
you." Something inside of me went, "Uh oh! That means that he's
been lying to me all along." That one thing, one seman-
THE BASIC STUFF 45
tically dense utterance and I turned around and I said, "I am going
to get out of here." And he said, "What's wrong?" And I said,
"You!" I said, "I just wanted to buy it. I didn't want to be lied to."
We did an experiment in this furniture store in California. It's a
big chain. They own furniture stores all over the place and I had
some success in the furniture business teaching salesmen. We did
an experiment, one day of training. And they have two stores, they
had one on one side of the freeway and one on the other side of the
freeway. We went in and trained the guys from one side of the
freeway for one day. And for the next month they increased their
close ratio between 10 and 50%. Just one day of training, by
teaching them to do things like enjoy their work. One of the things
that one of those guys in that store that we did the training in
raised his hand and he said, "Look, sure you could, maybe you
could vary your behavior for some people, but you know some of
these people come in here, they bring somebody who's some kind
of an expert, right? And if that person doesn't like what you have,
there is nothing you can do to sell that person a piece of furniture."
And I said, "Gee, it's funny when I hear that, I'm thinking of
selling two pieces of furniture. Because if you get the right strategy
from that person, if you pay enough attention to them you're going
to be able to influence them." Now, inside the back of this book
there is a page and it has a list of submodalities and then it says
experience one and experience two. Now, I want you to try
something like I demonstrated with Peter (earlier).
Now keep in mind the following things, also. People under-
stand words at the same rate that they speak them. Now I'll tell
you this is a lesson that was learned very hard for me. I had to go
through a very painful experience, but there's a group of people
involved in an activity called head hunting. This is where you go
in and steal employees for fun and profit. And I was training a
group of people and the way we did the training is we actually had
46 PERSUASION ENGINEERING'
the room set up with telephones all around the wall. And people
would go out and they would call somebody and then they would
come back and if they didn't get through and get what they wanted
we would play a tape of it out loud and we would go through it.
Well there was one guy who came back in and he played the tape.
This prospect designed a certain kind of floppy disk something or
other. I didn't understand technically what he did, but I understood
this guy could talk slower than any human I have ever met on the
face of the earth. Now, the guy told me, he had been trying to land
this prospect for over two years because there were very few
individuals who could do what he could do. And he couldn't
understand it, he was offering him more money, he was offering
him more job security. He said, "I tried offering him anything." But
he wouldn't even meet with him. Now the thing is, this was the top
guy at this company. Now this guy was good, he was snappy, he
was quick, he was bright, but when he called this prospect up, this
prospect spoke very, very slowly,
"Helllooo, thiiissss iiiissss Geeooooorrrrggggge
SSSchhwwaaaarrrrrtttttsssss, HHHHowwww mmmmaaaaayyyyy
IIIIIII hhhhhelllllpppppp yyouuuuuu?"
And this guy was out like a race horse? FFFFFFTTTTTT . . .
out of the gate and onto the track. "Well, George," he said, speak-
ing quickly, "I've gone to my people and I think we can offer you
more. I think its going to be an opportunity (Blablablablabla)," and
George, would go, "I'm sorry I don't feel right about this." See, the
thing is, is when people speak to you the reason they speak the
rate that they speak, most of the time has to do with the ability
they have to process information normally. Now, it doesn't mean
you cannot speed this process up. I know. I do it in seminars. I
start out slower and I speed it up slowly and pretty much you can
get people to process information more quickly. You also have to
understand that this is only about consciousness. Because
THE BASIC STUFF 47
you can speak very fast and it will go in unconsciously. But
unconsciously is not going to get somebody to meet with you to
talk with you about changing their job. It's not going to get them to
feel secure, because when it is just going in unconsciously the
conscious mind isn't involved in things. What happens is people
feel unnerved. Their unconscious is going "yes, yes" and their
conscious mind is going "yeah, but . . . I could see myself, I feel
off balance, I feel uncertain."
One of the primary rapport skills is that I want you to just open
your ears up and you talk, listen to their intonation pattern. Listen
to the counter predicates they use in language. Do they use a lot of
picture words or a lot of feeling words or a lot of hearing words?
Because you know it's that whole sentence that counts, "Well, it
looks like a good opportunity but I feel that I am not ready for it."
Now, this means to tell you something about the sequence of
how information is processed in this individual. There is no right
or wrong in this. There is no good or bad. There is no diagnosis,
tomorrow they might be different but it does give you the oppor-
tunity, if you listen to the intonation and if you listen to the
sequence of how predicates fall out. I mean, do they have a ten-
dency to use nothing but visual words, you'll get those. They'll
come in and go well, "Yes, I've been looking for a new stereo." I
mean I could really see how it would be something where we
would have great evenings. We could listen to music." You can
tell this is the kind of person that it's not going to even matter that
much about what it sounds like. You are going to have to show
them, and you are going to have to be careful where you put that
because you don't want to put the picture in the wrong place. You
want to put it in the right place, not in the not right place. Major
thing.
Look at something, where you feel it is right and everything
feels perfectly, versus where you have doubt. Where it just feels
48 PERSUASION ENGINEERING'
off kilter. Have you ever gone in and there is something and you
want to buy it. And after you look at it with a person, something
inside of you gave you the willies? Made you go, "Uh, it's just not
right?" Or everything felt perfect, but when it was time to sign the
contract . . . How many of you have had people that were just
absolutely yes, yes, yes, and when you sat down suddenly there
was doubt that hadn't been there? Like it came out of the blue.
Well one of the things we found, is that, for a lot of people,
doubt is down right. And all the things they doubt and all the
worries and their fears and stuff is, as we say down right important
to them. Now what happens is that, if you sit somebody down at a
desk and slide your contract right into that same place you can get
them to doubt it in a cold second. Make sure that you use clip
boards so you can have variety in where you place it and have
them sign it. Now, it's not always in the same place for everybody
but you want to be able to have ways of engineering each situation
for yourself.
One of the tacks that I have taken with people, especially with
large ticket items, is they say, "Well, I am here to look for a car."
and I always go, "Well, I won't show you a car, right now. There is
something more important we need to deal with first. Because I
don't want to sell you the wrong car, I don't want to sell you a car
that you can't afford. I only want to make sure that you understand
my job is to make sure that you are making the right decision.
Now, I know in the past there's times you've made the right
decision, you've bought something and it's been perfect for you
and you were totally satisfied. And there have been times where
perhaps you've bought something and then afterwards weren't
satisfied. It's my job to make sure you use your best judgment. So
I want to ask you a couple of questions first. I want to ask you to
think of a time where you were totally satisfied with something.
You knew it was right and you were right." And I'll watch where
THE BASIC STUFF 49
their eyes move. Now people have told me that you can't do this
with people. And I am here to tell you that I have done it in every
situation from selling jets to people that don't speak the same lan-
guage, to selling stamps. That is not stamps like the post office
has. But stamps that are worth somewhat more money than that.
Because they are unusual and old. Talk about a scam huh? Well
these stamps aren't good anymore, and there aren't that many more
around so they are worth more money, right. Why are they worth
more money? Because, there aren't many of them around and there
are people who will buy them. Like you for instance, you couldn't
buy now figure out that buy and buy something will cross your
mind. I love that phrase "cross your mind."
When you have people too set in their ways, you go, "Let's
brain storm about this." That will always take them off the wall.
They say, "What are you doing?" and you say, "Oh, nothing.
That's it, just put it out of your mind." It's a great phrase. I want
you to stop and think about other things. Have you ever had people
that all of a sudden start shaking their head no? If they shake their
head no, then the only thing to do is just mirror them and shake
with it and start nodding yes. Sometimes they'll go right with you.
It's always worth a shot, I figure. I like to breath at the same rate as
people when I am dealing with them, too, especially on a one on
one. And I breath with them and then I'll mirror them and start
nodding my head yes, before I ask them questions. Because that
way their head is already nodding yes. And I go, "Do you feel it's
time to sign this contract?" and they'll go, "Yeah, I guess I do."
And I'll go, "Well not me, I'm not ready yet." And they'll go,
"You're not?" And I'll go, "Nah. Not until I do something else."
Because the other thing I'd like you to do is to make a little list
for yourself. Whatever it is that you do, you encounter a list of
what's called "objections." We'll cover this later. What I want you
50 PERSUASION ENGINEERING'
to do first is to begin making a list of those you get in your
business.
Now the next thing I want you to do is I want you to go back
and find somebody else to do this next experiment with. It does
require that you use your behavior to induce the states, but I want
you to go through and find a time where they saw something and
they wanted it, and they knew it. It was perfect. They made the
right decision. Because what we are interested in here is not just
where somebody bought something and loved it, but where they
had to make a decision about it. Where they decided between sev-
eral things and made the best decision, a decision they are satisfied
with and have been for some time vs. where they bought
something and they weren't satisfied with it. In fact they say things
to you like, "Well, I knew better, but for some reason I just had to
do it anyway." Now, I want you to have them think about one and
think about the other and then have them go through and do both
at the same time. (See Figure 1) Ask, "Is there a difference?" This
is the magic word. Is there a difference between the location of the
images? Is there a difference between which one is closer, or are
they both the same distance, equal distance? Do you see yourself
in both of them? Or do you see what you saw at the time, when
you look at them? I want you to go through these because these
are classic decisions. What you are going to do is to explore what's
going on inside their mind that distinguishes a good decision from
a bad decision. Cause the trick is you can get both of those, but
when you sell somebody, when you negotiate a contract, when
you do any of those things, and it goes through the bad decision
one, you may feel clever but you will pay for it down the road.
You will get buyer's remorse. You will get cheated, you will get
no referrals, you may even get worse than that, you may get sued,
you may get all kinds of things you don't want. Part of what you
need to do if you are a really professional persuasion
THE BASIC STUFF 51
Figure 1
52 PERSUASION ENGINEERING'
engineer is to distinguish in your own mind between the fact that
both of these things exist in everybody.
Everybody makes good decisions and bad decisions and from
our point of view it doesn't matter which is made when they make
decisions somewhere else. But when they make decisions with us,
we want them to be good ones. And you can engineer whatever it
is that goes down, so that all their needs are filled. If they get a
product that will service them, the one that they can afford, they'll
be genuinely satisfied. Because if you sell people stuff that they
can't afford, they will get mad at you down the road. They will
blame you for everything. So, if you have them make good deci-
sions, you'll always be better off. Now, I go to great lengths, you
know, because the things that I sold, sometimes were very expen-
sive. If they are very expensive the person can't really afford it in
their world, I'll go inside and change their belief system about
what their world is and how much money they can make. How
many of you bought something that was more expensive, like a
house, so you had to raise your income? And it worked. Well, if
you do it deliberately, you can do it in sequence. See I like to raise
my income before, it's just, you know, it works better for me. But,
then I was the guy that wrote my term papers at the beginning of
the semester. And then went on vacation and came back and then
got paid for writing everybody else's. I wrote it in a little computer
program and in those days, there were no computers around. But I
happened to work in a lab where there was a computer. It wasn't
my computer and I was supposed to do other things but I didn't
like those things. So I wrote an algorithm by which I could write
history papers and just pushed buttons and it would spew them
out. So you know I would get the computer to knock these out, do
a little editorial work, I'd have fifteen, twenty papers, just cruise
out and I'd have a whole line of people waiting for them.
They were the people whose motivation strategy was the clos-
THE BASIC STUFF 53
er it got to the end, the more motivated they got. And there were
some people who actually wrote the papers, they would stay up all
night and then there were the ones that the closer it got to the end,
the more they criticized themselves. And tried to find some other
way. Since it was Stanford, they found a way of paying somebody
else. There were some people at Stanford that didn't even go their
classes, they hired somebody to be them. They didn't even go the
first day, they would just show up at the frat house. They would
hire some guy, his job was to be them for the year, go to all their
classes, take all of their tests and the only thing they did was they
went to beer busts. Think about it: some of those people are sur-
geons today. I know that, I was there, I wrote their papers. They
got their Ph.D.'s and you know became very famous psychologists,
some of which are published and well known. And they didn't go
to their classes, and they didn't even write their thesis. All we did
was put together the statistics. I wrote an algorithm so that it
would vary all of the input, so that you were bound to get the right
variance. By the way some of the famous research that is quoted
on television, came out this program I wrote. You could put in any
research project and it will make it so that it comes out right. So
that any point of view your trying to prove will be proved, because
it alters the data to fit the variant. All the time you would hear
these famous quotes on the news and stuff, they say, "In the late
60's it was proven," don't believe it. Because you know what?
There are guys pushing buttons like this all over the world. When
people try to prove stuff to you with research, be very wary espe-
cially if it is about your health. But oooooh research, yeah yeah.
That will move the picture right over. Well you might sell that to
someone else but don't swallow it whole. Also, understand that a
lot of other people don't, either.
Now what I want you to do is you go through ... I am not
asking you to change anything. There is nothing to change here.
54 PERSUASION ENGINEERING'
All I want you to do is understand the difference and especially I
want you to be able to move around so that you can sit at the side
of somebody. I want you to move around a little bit and start
imagining that this is out there inside their mind. That you actually
get to walk around in somebody's mind by moving around them
where they have put the pictures.
That means that if you don't like what is in a picture you can
knock it out. Literally. People go, "Well ..." I say, "Wait a
minute." They go, "Huh?" You get to do things like if the picture
isn't close enough you can get behind it and push it and that kind
of stuff works all the time. I do it constantly. Now, I will show
you a little something that I want you to try. I want you, when you
find out where the thing is that they are delighted with, the good
decision, so that if it was for them in one place .... I want you to
actually walk around them and I want you take your hand . . . and
this is the trick . . . and go curved to flat with you hand and back to
curved as you touch their picture. So that you treat it as if it is real.
FFFT . . . Great sound to make while you do it, by the way. All
systems help. So the thing that is really a good decision for you is
right here. So what we want to know is if the decision that you
have made so far is really a good one. Because if we take this
Mercedes and we put it in the same place as the good decision we
want to know if it will stick. Does it feel like a good decision? See,
you want be able to do things like, if they have it fixed in their
mind that they have to have a station wagon or they have to have a
big backyard . . . we could even take one side and pull it out a little
bit and throw it away. Try on something new. Just to see if you can
make yourself happier. You do want to be happier? Aren't those
rhetorical questions wonderful? I love those things. We have
people going "No, no I don't want to be happier. Not me. I was
happy last year and look what happened. No more happiness for
me." You never get that. Not once do I get that.
THE BASIC STUFF 55
And I ask people, I say, "Do you want to feel,good?" And they
go, "Yeah." And I go, "Good. Let us take a look at this." Like that
is related. But as long as you are congruent you can always con-
nect everything together. Remember, people use this. This stuff by
the way is called "junko logic." It comes from a man called
George Paulu who wrote a book called "Patterns of Plausible
Inference", where he studied what is credible in the human mind
but doesn't make any sense at all. But when we hear it as human
beings we go, "Wow, yeah!". And the fact that things are con-
nected together are just that they occur in sequence one right after
the other. We assume that they are related and that it doesn't matter
what it was. You say, "Well, you want to be happy?" And they say,
"Yeah, I want to be happy." "Well, then let us take this picture and
move it away and put this one here and find out if you are." "Ya,
let's do that. That makes sense." "Well good, then let's try it."
I know . . . you're saying inside your head, "I don't know if I
can do this. What is it going to be this or this?" You will love
doing this because you are going to discover that it is going on all
the time. I mean I see wives go in and husbands and they look at a
house and they say it is a great deal and they go back and forth and
she will look at him and go, "I don't know. It sounds like a lot of
money. Can you feel this?" as she touches him and he will go,
"Yes, this is lot of money." Even though it is a great deal. You will
have to watch for it because it comes at you from the other
direction. The best way to become aware of it is to become a mas-
ter of it and you can practice all day long everywhere you go. It is
so much fun. You see my point? (with finger pointing) And
something inside you goes, "Yes!", and even though you know it
is going on, you still see my point, don't you?
Remember the purpose of this is to amaze yourself. Try little
things, like taking the pictures of things and moving them back-
56 PERSUASION ENGINEERING'
wards and forwards a little bit. Does it increase or decrease the
state? You can make people more sure of a bad decision. They will
go, "Well, I know it was wrong, I feel it was wrong." The picture is
in one place and you can take the picture and make it bigger and
move it up and closer and they will go, "Maybe it was the right
thing." I'm not kidding. I want you to try this. When you put those
hands behind it, move pictures a little closer, say, "Take a little
closer look at this."
Use that phrase. I love that phrase, too. "Take a closer look at
this. Can you feel this will be a good idea?" It is wonderful, what
idea? I don't even have an idea and you're agreeing with me. Keep
those ears open. It'll come out so fast that you will start listening
because if you don't it will go inside and be there for the rest of
your life. And then when you end up in therapy and you are going,
"I don't know why I'm in therapy I just felt the need to come here.
Seems I have this problem with my hand." That is the way it
works. I taught a flirting class by the way just for the fun of it and
it was the weirdest thing that ever happened. I literally had these
people come and it was the quietest group. I thought they were
going to come in to have fun but I got all these scared little
puppies. I lined them up in a row and I put all the women on one
side and all the guys on another. And I told the women that I
wanted them to nonverbally either give a green light or a red light
to the guy across from them and then what I wanted the guy across
from her to do if it was a green light to hold up one finger if it was
a red light to hold up two. And I had them do this and I said, "Now
ladies, how many of the guys across from you got it right?" I had
two hundred people in the line, three of them got it right. That is
not a good statistic. And you know who these guys were dating?
You know who has the greatest opportunity to flirt is married
couples. What surprised me was when I put this out, married cou-
THE BASIC STUFF 57
pies thought they weren't allowed to go. I thought they'd be filling
the place. "Oh, I'm sorry, we don't flirt. We are married." "I beg
your pardon." You know what that does, that builds in that once-
you-get-married-then-you-get-to-enjoy-life-less, less, less and less.
See this was a bad sales job. You want to make it so that every
time you look at what you decided to do you are happier and more
passionate about it. That includes what you do for a living.
* CHAPTER FOUR:
PRECISION ELICITATION
Let's face it, when you're in most of these business situations,
how much time do you have to spend with a customer? I mean,
sometimes, you can ask all the questions you want and sometimes
you don't have much time. Also, there are many people who will
give you all the information you need without you even having to
ask for it directly. If you're in the everyday activities of any busi-
ness, you know that there are sometimes too many times, or even
too long a time when small talk occurs. When it occurs, I like to
use it for its value to the process. What an opportunity to under-
stand what's really going on.
Since "Linguistic" is our middle name, and language is one of
the things we use to communicate what's going on inside our
head, let's use this as an opportunity to learn to build new com-
binations of what you already understand on an intuitive level
anyway. Because conscious understanding will enable you to
unconsciously begin building new understandings of what to do
and when, especially adding flex ability for your own communi-
cating processes.
I like to point out that words are just words that can have more
of an impact than you may have thought possible. In the Meta
Model is a category called Modal Operators. Now think of these
as the juices that rev up the action.
60 PERSUASION ENGINEERING'
Now, I want you to play this sentence in your head, use your
own internal voice for this. I find that if you do it out loud you
never know who's around and may hear you and call the men with
the white coats. Of course, if you do it inside your head so they
can't hear you, then talking to yourself is OK, right? Use this as an
example. Say:
* I wish I could take off Monday.
And notice the kinesthetics, the feelings of that statement and
whether or not you feel strongly enough to do it. Now say the fol-
lowing, one at a time. What I want you to do is to stop after each
one and notice the feelings you get and the difference from one to
the other:
* I'd like to take off Monday.
* I want to take off Monday.
Notice the difference. These are just words. Now say:
* I need to take off Monday.
» I have to take off Monday.
* I must take off Monday.
* I can take off Monday.
* I will take off Monday.
Now notice the differences from one to the other by changing
only one word! Now here is the even more interesting thing. Say:
* I'm going to take off Monday.
And notice the difference. Notice the feeling and whether the
picture of the event is a movie or a still shot, color or black
&white, the distance from you, do you see yourself in it or not, etc.
Notice whatever it is, and I want you to go do this with some-
one else, the action is around the verb take off. Now the interest-
ing thing is that the best decision strategies that people make are
movies and they include the following ingredients: meeting certain
criteria which include very specific-to-the-individual voice
qualities when describing those criteria. Those criteria are also
PRECISION ELICITATION 61
driven by certain modal operators, of which the hierarchy of
importance is primarily based on the modal operators driving those
criteria. When a specific combination is made, the verb will go
into an active mode and when the present tense of the verb is used,
the intention for the action will change. Since time doesn't exist,
only now exists, using the present form of the verb in the sentence
will change the motivation for the action if it is planned to occur at
a time description other than now. Another ingredient is that,
people will more probably take action when they can see the
movie run to the end, going through their options for more sat-
isfaction and planning other activities around the event. These will
also include information in the three major representational
systems: kinesthetic, auditory and visual. So now let's do this all at
once and say:
• I'm taking off Monday.
Notice what happens. If you had a slide, or still picture, it turns
into a movie, it runs to the end and you plan what you will be
doing Monday, don't you? You see, it's much easier to pay
attention and use what's presented to you than it is to try to go
inside your head and figure out whether someone fits into another
meta description, like other sales programs use. I find that we don't
have time during our everyday business to try to figure things out
about what we think is going on inside someone else's head.
Your customer will always communicate what's going on and
what the opportunity solutions are.
Now, if you were to say:
• I should take off Monday.
You'll again notice what happens to your own motivation. Oh
well, that's the way it works. The most intriguing thing is that
everyone may respond differently to any of these words.
I don't know why, but often people will come up to us in our
62 PERSUASION ENGINEERING1
seminars and tell us that they can't make pictures. Now we know
that everyone uses all their senses, especially the three major ones
and it's just a matter of how consciously aware they are over the
control they have over their own processes. So this one time this
guy comes up to us and tell us that he can't make pictures and was
getting quite frustrated about this. The more interesting version of
this is when they tell us that they can't make pictures as well as the
other people they are working with. My question is, how do they
know how well the other person is making them unless they can
also see what the other person is doing and then making the
comparison to their own?
After listening to this one person tell me about how he just
went to another NLP seminar where he was told by the other sem-
inar leader that he was just one of those people who wasn't going
to be able to see his pictures, I said to myself. "What a bag of
garbage that was." And now this guy was starting to build the
belief about this. I decided to take the easy way out and I looked at
him and said, "So you thought you couldn't make pictures?" and
he says, "Yup." And his shoulders slumped, he lets out a short
snort and begins to nod his head. I looked at him and said, "Well,
I'm not going to ask you to make a picture of anything." He says,
"Oh, good, because if someone else asks me to make a picture, I'm
going to get real mad." And I said, "I want you to remember the
most pleasant time you ever had as a youngster." He says, "OK, I
remember once when I was a kid playing in my room with a new
toy." I asked him, "What color is the room?" He says, "Green." I
asked him to describe the room to me and he does. Not only is he
describing what he sees, he shows me with his hands as he sculpts
the room in front of him. Once he describes the room, I ask him if
everything is clear to him and he says, "YES!", lets out a yahoo
then continues on in the seminar. One of the things that ought to
be clear is that when, as a com-
PRECISION ELICITATION 63
municator, you don't get the response you want, change what
you're doing! This isn't a new idea, by the way, but I think that
people tend to make things more difficult than they need to be
most of the time.
As a professional communicator, salesperson, business person,
or whatever, when you know where you're going it's easier to get
there and when you get any resistance, it's easy to recognize as
long as you're paying attention.
Ask one of your customers about "what are you buying
today?", not what are they looking for, or other questions like this.
There are certain things in the process that you do want to pre-
suppose about the action, not the filters necessarily, so use unspec-
ified (sensorily) language to find out where they are first.
Whatever their response is, it will be full of valuable information
about where you're going and how you can get there. Whenever
you've bought something, you've gone through your own process-
es. Like, let's say you sell homes, for example. Your customer
walks in and you start the conversation. They say, "Well, I'm
looking for a new home," or "I want to talk about a new home," or
"I want to walk through a new home," or whatever, this provides
for the opening representational system as well as the road map
with different avenues for you to use.
So you start the conversation and collect the information. I
have a few trainees in sales who now, instead of sitting in their
office waiting for the next person to show up and "it's their turn",
stand by the windows and watch outside the building so that way,
as potential customers drive up and step out of their cars, they
often stop, look around and may even walk over to a few cars in
the lot, or even to the model home next door, depending on the
business. Maybe they look at different items in the store. Then the
salesperson can walk up to them and she may say to them, "Hello,
I'm Sue. I noticed that you were looking at the xyz model
64 PERSUASION ENGINEERING'
and the abc model ..." Then they pause and wait for the response.
Most times, the customer will describe what they want, the color,
etc. and even give you more information than if you actually tried
to elicit it. Do that. Even if it's not the business you're in or if you
think you don't have the opportunity to do it. Make the
opportunity. Whenever I find someone doing something that
works I want to experiment with it. I'll even go into other people's
businesses to find out. You know, even retail stores, or whatever.
So you start the process, and open your eyes and ears and all
your senses and begin to map out the information as they present it
to you. Have you noticed how many people talk with their hands?
Know why? Because they do and when they do that, they show
you their map. They'll point out their favorite places to put
information, they point out their time and space relativity, and
they'll even show you how they disregard information by pushing
it away with their hands. And the sounds they make when they do
this. OOOOOOOOOH what a wealth of information! You know
some of the sounds: Hrmph, snort, nah, tsk tsk, Ahhhhh,
Mmmmm, Ahh Haaaaa, and others.
It's like, maybe you've learned to paraphrase back to people
things they say as a way of letting them know you understand
them. What an insult! I mean if you think about something that's
important enough for you to want and let's say you call it "Fun." Is
"Fun" and "a good time" the same? Probably not, and they're
probably in different locations on your map, right? Some of you
may say, "Well they're sort of the same," which means they're not
the same. Let's start going for precision hear. So, paraphrasing is
some convoluted way of trying to let the other person know that
you think you understand enough of what they're saying and that
you can actually help them. This is not the best way to build "yes"
responses. If you want to build sort of responses or could be
PRECISION ELICITATION 65
responses, then ok, but we want to build "YES." Why even go
near resistance? No sense makes this!
Think of paraphrasing in a new way. I call it "parrot phrasing."
Most people will teach you how to not match so well so that you
aren't mimicking someone or making fun of them and I agree, if
you have other than good intentions. Your customer is paying you
for results, not to screw with them. It isn't something that you do
all the time, everyday. You do it when you want to test that you
got it right and to demonstrate you're understanding. Just like
anything else, too much of anything can be too much.
So when you know what you're doing and you're congruent
and you have a way of knowing how you're doing, then precision
is best. People go, "But doesn't that take lots of practice?" And I'll
tell you what, after teaching this for years, I can tell you that it's
not something new you're learning to do, unless you've never
learned how to open your eyes and ears, and all your senses.
"Parrot phrasing" is about delivering back exactly, did I say that
right? EXACTLY and PRECISELY what you hear and see, I mean
the hand demonstrations, and everything. That's everything, of
course, that's useful to the process. Why anyone would want to
match back sneezing, confusion, or distaste in the selling process
when selling your products or services is . . .
Also, you don't have to repeat everything they say, only the
responses that you know are of value to them . . . How do you
know this?
Now one of the reasons why precision is so important here is
that everything has it's place to fit back into. The sentence struc-
ture and their hand mapping will demonstrate that to you each and
every time.
I hear so many times when well intentioned sales people ask a
simple question like, "What do you want in the (product or ser-
vice)?" And the response comes like ... "I need this, want these
66 PERSUASION ENGINEERING1
and would like to have these other things ..." And the salesperson
gives them all back as needs. Or they may even ask for their needs
first, which may or may not be the best place to start. Think about
it. Some people say, "Oh, you're just using semantics." And I go,
"Yeah, what's wrong with that?" After all, we are talking about
communication here, aren't we? Or they go, "You're trying to put
words in my mouth," and I say, "No, I'm trying to get them to
come out."
So when thinking modal operators, for example, wants, needs,
and like to haves, have each their own time and place. (Remember
the exercise in Chapter 3?) Think of them as: in the order of
importance for most people. I mean, even if you have five wants,
they can be placed in order of importance, but how many of you
really have time to sort through this? Sometimes there's entirely
too much information, it seems that way, at least, that we as selling
professionals have to sort out. "Let's keep it simple and powerful,"
I always say. I mean, less is more. Why build roads that we don't
need? Why not use the ones that are already there and use them for
racing for fun and profit?
Take this example where the lady comes into this showroom
and is looking to buy a new kitchen. The saleswoman says to her,
"Hi, I'm Linda . . ." greeting the woman. The woman says, "I'm
just looking right now, you know, just shopping around, for a new
kitchen. I'm not sure where I'm going to buy it, yet, I'm just look-
ing." So Linda says, "Well you, like me, don't look like someone
who just settles for any old thing. I mean, it looks to me that your
kitchen is very important to you. And I wouldn't sell you just any
old kitchen, so what's your new kitchen going to be like because
we only will sell you the kitchen that will thrill you each and every
time you look at it!"
Now the customer begins to walk through the showroom and
stops and begins to describe her kitchen:
PRECISION ELICITATION 67
"I need to have lots of storage space for my pots and pans, I
have lots of different pots and pans, you know. And I need counter
top space to work on. I want wood cabinets, maybe oak, and I
want the doors to the appliances to match the cabinets. I also want
indirect lighting and I'd also like to have some built in items, you
know, like a mixer, the instant hot water thing. Yeah, those would
really be nice." And the whole time she's explaining this, she's
showing Linda exactly where all these things are right there in
front of her. And then Linda says to her, "Ok, let me see if I got
this right. You need lots of storage space, you need counter space
to work on, you want wood cabinets, maybe oak, and the appli-
ance doors to match the cabinets. You want indirect lighting and
you'd also like to have some built in items in your new kitchen."
All the time, Linda's also redrawing the map right there in front of
this woman! And this woman looks at Linda and goes, "You've
got it! (This is the music of success, what a powerful response
since this customer didn't know where to buy.) You know, I've
been looking for some time now and you're the first person who
understands exactly what I'm looking for. You haven't even tried
to talk me into something I really don't want. Do you think you
can help me to build my new kitchen?" Now Linda says to her, get
this, "Yes, I think we can build your new kitchen because we
know exactly what you're looking for. And we want you to be
thrilled with your new kitchen. Now, let's go into a few more
details so we can fill in the other pieces to this picture for me your
kitchen as I start to sketch it out here to give to your designer, who
will then figure out all the precise dimensions of everything." Now
I thought this was great but Linda didn't stop there. She asks this
woman if she wants to go with stock cabinets, or custom designed.
Of course the woman asks what's the difference. I thought that
Linda was about to create her first own objection for this deal
when she said, "Well, of, course, custom design is a little
68 PERSUASION ENGINEERING'
more money, but, the price difference is so insignificant when you
get exactly what you're looking for, after all." This woman looks
at her and says, "Let's take a look at the custom designed cabinets
first." This is priceless, as most of these opportunities can be.
Think about how many times time and price, the two major objec-
tions, or excuses, as the case may be, are only excuses. How many
times have you gone out to buy something with a specific price in
mind and you spent more for the item than you even had budgeted
anyway? Another ten to fifteen thousand on a home or another
three or four thousand for a car? And only because you "felt right
about the deal or the salesperson]" Think about it. So getting the
customer to "feel right" is a valuable selling objective.
As a general guideline, we know that people like guidelines
and procedures. Sometimes guidelines aren't useful and sometimes
they are. When they are used to get you started, you see, then you
develop your own set of skills so you drive your own bus because
you learn how to use what's going on around you as your
guideline. So, I like to gather up about maybe four, five or six
things before "parrot phrasing" them back. If they give you one,
and you give it back, and they give you another, and you give it
back, and do that four or five times, they'll look at you real funny.
The local business chamber had called me to ask if we would
be interested in a price comparison on some insurance. We're a
member of this business group so I said sure. So this guy calls me
up a few weeks later from this insurance company and says, "I
understand that you're looking for insurance." This is not the best
way to start. I, of course realized that someone, somewhere
screwed this up so I said, "Well, not exactly. Someone asked me if
I would be interested in a comparison and I said, sure." And this
guy says to me, "Well that's not what I was told. When can I meet
with you? I said, "You can't. I'm too busy. Send me the infor-
mation so I can look at it. Then, if I like what I see, we can sit
PRECISION ELICITATION 69
and talk more." The guy says, "We don't do it that way. We have
to make an appointment and sit face to face." I said, "I'm really too
busy for that right now. It would really be better for me if you
could send me the information first so I could look at it. Then I'll
call either way, whether I like the comparison or not, and let you
know if we can get together." This guy says, "I just told you we
don't do it that way." I reached down into the depths of my under-
standing and said to him, "I'm too busy right now." He asks if he
can call me in a few weeks and I said sure. Hey, I figured, maybe
he'll get it and just send me the information first, then call. Well
today he calls and the first thing out of this guys mouth is, "Hi, this
is Sam, you told me to call you today." I said, "because you asked
if you could. . . so what can I do for you?" He asked me again if I
had twenty minutes I could give him. I repeated my request for the
information and this guy says to me, get this, "Do you have an
insurance license?" I said, "I'm the customer, I don't need one."
This guy loses it and starts yelling something about blowing that
stuff past other people but not to do it on him so I didn't as I
clicked down the receiver. I'll bet business is tough for him. I
mean, I was really looking for a comparison, what with the prices
all over the place today, but, now neither he nor the company he
works for will ever get my business, someone else will. Maybe it
will be Linda.
Sometimes I do enough seminars in a row that sometimes I
even forget. I'll get up after it is all over the next day and I'll come
down and sit by myself. Actually one time I did something like 75
seminars that were either 1 or 2 days all over the country on this
what I refer to as a psychocircus tour. They had Gregory Bateson
and Buckminster Fuller and Ashley Montegue and all these people
and we would all go into a city and they'd run 3 days for the peo-
ple that were there and we would go on Friday to one city,
Saturday to the next, Sunday to the next and do an hour. I kept
70 PERSUASION ENGINEERING'
doing this going around the country and when it was finally over I
flew to meet a friend of mine in Houston and I actually got up in
the morning and put on a suit and went downstairs just like an
automatic on program. It is easy for human beings. One thing that
we learn quickly is a rut. We are masters of that. Virginia Satir
once told me, she said, "The will to survive is not the strongest
instinct in human beings. The strongest instinct in human beings is
to do what is familiar." And that is part of what makes it hard for
us is that we learn something that works to some degree then we
have a tendency to just keep doing it and even when it doesn't
work, do it with people. What we try to do is increase the volume
to get it to work. I've noticed this when I go to foreign countries
and there are other Americans there. They will walk in and they
will go, "Can you tell me where the bathroom is?" And the person
will go, "No English." And they will raise their volume and go
"CAN YOU TELL ME WHERE THE BATHROOM IS?" And they
will go (loudly) "NO SPEAK ENGLISH." And they will go even
louder "CAN YOU TELL ME WHERE THE BATHROOM IS?"
As if volume will break the language barrier.
One of the things I want to do with elicitation is, actually two
things I want to accomplish and one I refer to as "Attitude
Adjustment."
I've noticed that some of you, not all of you, some of you are
just a little too nice. Now being nice is fine but there is a differ-
ence between being nice and making it so. Some people just do
things that make me wince. For me, the ones that make me wince
are the ones that have bad tonality. It is not even that I can't sell
them something it is just that the question is how fast can you do it
without having your eardrums break. I had a lady who is from
Long Island who probably had the worst tonality of any human
being on the planet. She spoke like a dental drill. When she came
PRECISION ELICITATION 71
in she said, "Oh look at that car. I want one of those." And the
inside of my teeth began to hurt. All the nerves in every tooth I
ever had where shimmering. I walked up and knowing my own
principles and wanting to try them, I turned around and I looked at
her and (with her tonality) I said, "Do you really want to buy a
car?" And she turned around and said, "Where are you from?" And
I said, "Long Island." And she said, "Oh, I knew this was my
lucky day." And I said inside my head, "Well it sure in hell isn't
mine." Sometimes you have to get that line inside your head so
that it just doesn't fly out of your mouth. But she had a husband
that looked like he had been punished by a bad tonality his whole
life. He was walking around behind her and he was like shoulders
slumped and he going, "Okay, Mildred anything you say,
Mildred." And she was going, "Let's get this one." And he went
over at the window sticker on the car and I could see his heart go
"ah, ah, ah, ah." He almost keeled over on the spot. And I told
him, "Stop that. Take a deep breath and just feel good." And I put
my hand over his ears and she said, "What are you doing?" I said,
"Oh it is a magic trick." I'm going to make that headache that has
been there for 70 years go away. I said, "Now, say inside your
head, I'm ready to get this." I opened my hands and he went, "Oh,
I'm ready to get this."
Now I want to teach you a couple of other things because I
don't know if you've noticed that human beings do not listen well.
Have you noticed that? Don't be ashamed because most human
beings don't really know much about hearing. Your ability to hear,
in what we do, especially those of you working on the telephone,
by the way.
There is a lot of people who think they hear well and I got
news for you. I'm just feeling like I'm getting started. Everyday I
start learning to hear more and more stuff. For example one of the
things that I noticed for those of you who had some NLP train-
72 PERSUASION ENGINEERING1
ing. Remember all of that stuff with the equations those guys do
who were stuck at various levels of my development? I meet these
people on planes and it is so much fun or in airports and places
because they are always going through reading one of my books
and writing equations out on paper and I think, "Poor soul. I'll help
him." So I walk up and I go, "Hey, what is that about?" And they
usually look at me and say, "It is very complex you wouldn't
understand." You see, it wasn't until recently I put a picture of
mine on the book, my publisher actually snuck that on behind my
back. Because it deprives me the opportunity to go and test things
like this. For example some years ago I was on my way to teach a
sales training course in Dallas, Texas. Flying from San Francisco I
sat down and when I sat down on the plane I was going to sit back
and relax but as I put my chair back and looked over there it was
... the cover of The Structure Magic staring back at me and I
peeked over and I looked at this guy and this guy had this look on
his face like he could eat shoe leather in a cold second. His ability
to stick his foot in his mouth would be unmatched. So I asked the
guy. I looked over at him and I said, "Are you a magician?" And
the guy looked at me and said, "Of course not." Like I could tell.
He is reading a book called The Structure of Magic and that is
where you find The Structure of Magic, by the way ... in the occult
section. Because every time I go into a book store that is where it
is . . . right there in the occult section, where it belongs. So I said
to this guy, I said, "If it is not about magic what is about?" And he
said, "It is about language." And he said, "It is very complex and .
. . ." And I said, "Well, I'm a pretty smart guy. Why don't you
explain it to me?" And he told me, "It takes years of training to be
able to understand this." And then he told me, which was a major
mistake, he said, "I'm a certified clinical psychologist." And I
went, "No shit." This is how you begin the constipation induction.
See I practice these things because, you see,
PRECISION ELICITATION 73
to me your ability to use language to begin to-induce a state . . .
one of the ways to practice is to be able to induce "involuntary
responses." Goose bumps is a good one. If you could talk about
situations where certain things occur you can actually be able to
get the responses that go with them. It is only a four hour flight
from San Francisco to Dallas that day. He had so many involuntary
responses that he went unconscious after a while. Just don't know
what happened. But you see, I stood up and I went to the bathroom
after a while, after this guy condescendingly explained to me how
The Structure of Magic, how "questions that you can listen . . ."
Actually he didn't say "listen" he said you could see the surface
structure of sentences and it tells you what to challenge inside of
people and I went, "Gee, I wrote the book and it doesn't make any
sense to me." And I looked back at him and I said, "Well, how do
you see the surface structure of a sentence?" And I looked in the
book and, since I wrote it, I know what is there sometimes. And
linguists did an interesting thing. They do it this way. They say
there is deep structure and surface structure. Now if you look at
The Structure of Magic, I don't know how many of you have read
it, but there are three appendixes in there. Because The Structure of
Magic was actually my dissertation. And the three appendixes the .
. . first one is called "System Simple", and it is a big thing full of
math and the second one is called "System Deep", and the third one
is called "System Trance." I was out to get my professors, believe
me. If you read the equations it even goes deeper and deeper still.
So as you go through the equations in the thing, as it goes down
the page it teaches you how you go from the unconscious
communication to the conscious communication so that as you
look down you can see how deep you can go inside yourself. It is
the kind of thing that says, well if you can induce a state of
confusion in people you can induce in them almost anything. Now
a lot of times people are very good at get-
74 PERSUASION ENGINEERING1
ting rapport but we are going to run through a couple of other
things. One of them has to do with your ability to switch the way
in which you speak. So that you can mirror someone else. Not just
sympathetically ... so that you can actually run around and try
different representational systems to be able to describe something
completely visually, completely kinesthetically so that you can
switch the way in which you do it.
But for our purposes here, I want you to begin to realize that
each and every statement that you make has an impact. So I want
you to try some of the simple confusion techniques that I use. I
know that others refer to this kind of stuff as pattern interruptions.
I'm a little more blatant about things than others, if you can imag-
ine that, but in a subtler kind of way. Instead of having people go
"Oooooohh", like that, I do it for them and as they are going up I
am telling them to close their eyes and relax. Because I want to
confuse them only about what it is that their beliefs are at a
moment in time.
Clients are going to say to you, in the course of your conver-
sation with them, the following thing, and I always want you to
hear it. They're gonna go, "uh huh," Do you know what that
means? That means that they didn't hear a thing you said. And
they go, "uh huh, um, yeah, uh huh. Um hum." Always take that as
something where you back up because it means that they've
already got a picture in their mind and they're just not gonna let
you change it, and they're gonna go, "uh huh" until they get a
chance to tell you about it. So you might as well stop then and
realize that you're not getting information through to them. The
following sounds are the magic cues that what you're saying is
going inside. When you tell them something and they go, "ooohhh,
aaahhh," this is one of the best. Ummmmm, because all of those
things are the sounds that start accessing in the mind. Think about
it. If somebody says, "Well, what movie do you want
PRECISION ELICITATION 75
to see tonight?" and you go, "ummmm. Then you're gonna go and
think of one." If you look at somebody and you say, "Well, what's
on your mind and they go, hummmmm." It's real different than if
they go, "Well, uh , hum, ah, ah," you know that what's on their
mind isn't gonna be good. It's really important for you to realize
that you want to keep them active in the process and the reason I
use so many rhetorical questions is I want them to feel yes coming
up. Yes coming up. To me, the more questions you can ask where
you get yes answers, not um hum answers, not ah huh, answers—
you go, "Do you want a good stereo?" and if they go, "Uh huh,"
then you didn't present it to them in a way which struck their soul.
Cause to me when I say okay, you came in here to buy a stereo, the
question is, do you just want a stereo? Cause you can get a boom
box. Actually, you could just buy one that's empty without
equipment that would look nice as furniture. Or "Do you want to
have music that surrounds you, something that looks beautiful in
your house and something that goes in your ears and over your
skin. Because those speakers right now are bathing you in sound
and you want that sound to be perfect, clear and clean. Something
that you'll, every time you look at it, know you can feel good at
any moment, cause it's not just music, it's something that changes
your mood. You want your mood to be bathed in static or do you
want to be able to go into sensuous states, or excited states,
anytime you want. That's called a compound statement, by the
way. Don't think about stereos, think about the compound
statement now.
Because when I present it to them, I'm going through each and
every one of their sensory systems, building something that's
sumptuous, something that's desirable. And this is true in you're
selling consulting. This is true of everything, you know. Do you
want things in your business to keep running along in the same old
groove until it just digs down in the dirt and you all burn out,
76 PERSUASION ENGINEERING'
and one of you has a heart attack and you all live in regret? Very
rarely do you get, "Uh huh?" Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's what we're
up to. Yeah, well, of course not. You go, "Is that like yes?" Very
important. Is that like yes. Now without the variation in tone and
without your ability to use your voice resonantly . . . because the
truth is, every time you speak to somebody the sound doesn't just
jump into their ears. In fact, the most important part of commu-
nication is the tone.
Can't you say no and mean yes? Yes and mean no? Very eas-
ily. Well, you know, "You want to go down and buy a Mercedes?"
"Yeah, sure." Sure, like when when hell freezes over.
Now, if you can beef up your attitude and beef up your ability
to hear things, because those very accessing sounds ... I found out
sometimes I just make them for them. I can go, "Are you interested
in having the quality of your life be better?" And as their eyes
begin to move, I go, "Hmmmmmmm." They'll go and shift and I'll
go, "Ahhhh." Now, your ability to be resonate in your tonality . . .
and I want to teach you a little trick here and I do this in public
speaking courses, but I want to do it here, too. I want you to know
what it feels like to have your voice resonate. That way you'll
recognize it in others, too.
So, put your feet on the floor, we're gonna do a little vocal
exercise. That's right, clear your throat and go, "Ahhhhhhhhh." Get
it out of your system. That's right, it's good for your throat. I know
whenever I say, "I want you to sound really good, there's always—
aaaahhhh." It's real easy. Now, the first trick is, before you make a
sound, I want you to breathe in because a lot of people forget that,
and they go, "Gaaakeeehhhh," as they run out of breath and that's
why it goes like that. So you inhale and take the air in, and then I
want you to do this: I want you to take two fingers and place them
on your nose, and you don't have to press hard or hit yourself or
anything and go, "This is my nose." Move
PRECISION ELICITATION 77
them down to your lips and say, "This is my mouth." Place them
on your throat and say, "This is my throat." Place them on your
chest and say, "This is my chest." Place them just below your ster-
num and say, "And if I speak from here, I'll quadruple my income.
And get much sex whenever I want."
Yeah, I know. People say, "You seem to have your mind on
money and sex," and I go "Yeah, Ohhhhhhh . . . Money.
Ohhhhhhhh, Sex and Fun. Ummmmm hmmmmmmm." Can't leave
that out because to me it's the propelling driving force of the
universe. It's the ability to find out you can turn anything into fun.
I had one guy in a seminar, he raised his hand, and he went, "Dr.
Bandler, um, I work for a company" with that drilling tone - that is
exactly the way he sounded, too by the way. I love these people, I
memorize 'em, photograph em, learn them so I can be an idiot, too.
I'm saving that for my retirement. When I have all the money I
want then I'm gonna use these behaviors to make sure I don't make
any more. And he goes, "I work for a company and all we sell is
fencing, and uh, there are lots of people that sell fencing, uh, how
can people get excited about fencing?" And I looked at him and I
said, "Well, I can get reeeal excited about fencing," and I said,
"Don't you believe fences are good?" And he goes, "Yeah, but, one
fence is no better than another." And I said boy, there's real faith in
the product, huh. I said, "Well, to me, you have to understand that
the most important thing to me is that somebody opens the door,
looks at that fence and they feel wonderful, otherwise, they're not
gonna send you new clients. They're gonna have 'em go to any old
fencing company. They're not gonna look outside and realize the
fence is a sense of security. It's a sense of privacy, it means you
can stand next to it naked and no one will know. It means that your
animals and your children won't wander off till they get older."
And what is it about it? You know, the dog learns to go under the
fence and the kids learn
78 PERSUASION ENGINEERING1
to go over it. Right. Now, I also discovered a little trick, I said,
"For me, you know, I want to walk into work and look at my prod-
uct and feel wonderful. Most people just sell fences. What if you
could sell a fence and a good feeling with it, that people could take
with them and have for the rest of their life?" And he looked at me
and said, "Wow." And I said, "Now, are you interested in buying
some fencing?" And he went, "Yeah." And I said, "Good. Then
buy it from yourself." He forgot in that moment what he was
doing, because he was so bathed in tonality that came from here,
your chest. Now if you're bent over and if you're crooked and you
don't realize sound is created from your entire movements then
you won't get the results..
Everything you do with your body. You need to open up your
body and be able to look at somebody and realize that you want to
project the sound, that it doesn't just come from your mouth by the
way, it comes from your chest. It seeps all over a person so that
when you look at them and you say things, I like this, "Well, today
I want to be honest with you." Right? Now the only way you can
say something that stupid is if you're inside making pictures of
how you're not gonna have enough money to pay your bills at the
end of the month because you have to plan for that sort of thing,
you know, otherwise it won't happen. I see people walk into stores
and watch sales people drive them away. It's unbelievable to me. I
watch people come in . . . why do you think they come into a car
lot? Right! To buy a car. People come in and they go, "Uh, can I
help you?" and people will go, "Just looking." And I always finish
the sentence — and go," ... at your future automobile." Why not?
They started the sentence, I get to finish it. It's only half a thought.
I'll decide where the rest of it comes from. I always look at that as
an opportunity. Everybody else I know walks away from it.
They're not a puma. They're not there with their nails out. I don't
walk up and go "Can I help you?" I walk
PRECISION ELICITATION 79
up and I say, "Are you looking to do something intelligent?" I
never have people look at me and go, "Nah, I'm just out to do stu-
pid stuff today. I'm trying to feel like a teenager, you know."
It's like, think of the things human beings are willing to do,
and I want you to think this through just for a moment. I know
some of you do these things, I don't want you to take it personally.
Human beings put on two sticks, ski down and jump off of a
mountain for fun.
Think about it, somebody said, "Hey, you can come down and
buy this stuff and jump off of a mountain." People went, "Wow,
give me a pair of those, I'll jump off the mountain, too." Think
about this. People with boats. You have to buy a boat so somebody
can drag you behind it on a pair of sticks. I think this is really
incredible. They used to call it keel hauling years ago, it used to be
punishment. But now, people learn to do tricks on the back. In
fact, if you're good at it, you can do it with only one ski and if
you're great at it, they don't even give you the skis they just drag
you behind the boat on the rope. People go out and spend enough
money to buy a boat and the stuff. Right. You used to go out and
insult somebody and they'd drag you behind the boat, now you
have to go out and spend the money to — and you have to get a
really fast boat so you can get dragged really well. There are peo-
ple who jump out of airplanes for fun. Deliberately. They go,
"Well, what do you want to do today?" And you go, "Hell, let's
jump out of an airplane." There's an idea. Now, if all of these
things could be made - and human beings when they do it, they are
having fun - this means that we need to stop and consider what we
can make enjoyable.
So I'm gonna ask you to try a little sales. I want to stop here
with you selling an idea to someone else, a friend or partner. And I
want that idea to be that you build in those beliefs that we talked
about. That the tougher it is to sell something to somebody, the
80 PERSUASION ENGINEERING1
more fun it is. Cause if you walked in and they go, "I want that,"
and you give it to 'em, that's kind of boring, it takes the play out of
it. The more stubborn they can be, the more stubborn you can be.
Now, you remember the exercise you did earlier with the sub-
modalities where you elicited the thing. What I want you to do is
to pull that page out again, only this time, I want you to get all the
submodalities that go with the powerful belief. Things like, do you
believe breathing is good? Something basic, do you believe the sun
is coming up? I want you to find out the location of where they
position that belief, and then what I want you to do is, in your most
smooth tonality, in your best presentation that you can make and in
every representational system, I want you to have that person
consider 3 new ideas: 1) That challenge is fun; 2) that you can sell
to anybody or convince anybody of anything. Now it doesn't
matter that it's not true, but if you have that belief, it means you'll
do it with every fiber of your muscles and your soul. Now, the way
I want you to do it is I want you to make it fun. I don't want you to
sit down and do that hard core stuff. I want you to walk up and
say, "Hey, do you believe the sun is coming up tomorrow?" Watch
where their eyes move. If not, say, "Well, do you see a picture in
your head? Do you have a voice that says yes or no?" Sounds a
little bit like schizophrenia. But everybody does it. You have to
know what you believe and what you don't believe. Soon as you
know where that image is, ask them how big it is. Is it like this, is
it like that? When you localize it, I want you to walk around and
get behind it, see, because I have an idea for you. I want to pull out
this picture, (wisssss) that says challenge is fun. "Can you see
this?" As soon as they say "Yes", go, (fffffff) put it right there
where the strong belief is. Now, it might seem like well, adults
don't normally do that, hell I did it in a Mercedes lot. And there's a
$3K commission. I don't know about you, I'm willing to act a little
foolish. They won't think it's offensive, not
PRECISION ELICITATION 81
when they're laughing. Not when they say, "What did you do?"
and you go, "Ahhhh, just pasting up new ideas, it's just something
I'm trying out here." It may seem silly, but you know, do you like
to enjoy yourself? Nay, not me, I hate to enjoy myself. I don't like
that. It's — I don't feel authentic if I'm enjoying myself. It's only
through pain, that you can change. Do you believe this? Somebody
sold that idea! Only through pain you can change. Hell, come on
over here, I'll whack you a few times on the side of the head. It'll
be good for ya. Maybe you'll get some sense in then.
Now, as you begin to build new pathways in your own brain,
so that your flexibility increases proportionately to your desire to
learn, really learn, we want you to write out the ambiguities, at
least the scope, syntactic, and phonological. You see, the Milton
Model, contrary to what most people think, is used for more than
just your "official" hypnotic work. There's one for you: "official"
hypnotic work, as if there's any other kind of trance than those that
you're in any way. I mean think about it. The thing about trance is
that it's just about altering states, which means a state other than
the one you're in just before this one. So it's just a matter of whose
trance you're in, where and when. But when you can generate
language patterns more elegantly, you can generate more than you
thought possible. Your senses are keener, sharper and you'll see
and hear things you didn't even know have been there all along.
So I want you to begin with the ambiguities: phonological,
scope, syntactic and punctuation. Take the first and write down
one hundred or more. That's write 100 or more. Because I want
you to say them and write them down. Over the next few days, I
want you to do this because this is one way of learning quickly.
Come up with as many as you can as quickly as you can at first. If
you find yourself laughing at them, that's great because humor is
the brainchild of creativity. Get yourself to laugh and find the
82 PERSUASION ENGINEERING'
humor in things and others will, too. Especially when you know
what you're doing. So start with funny logical ambiguities and
write them down. There must be a zillion of them out there. Write
out all versions of the same one, there may be two or three or
more. Even if there spelled the same and have a different meaning,
write them down for each meaning you find. Then I want you to
run these past your friends and have fun with them. They may find
others for you. Write them down.
I mean, just think about it, everything we can do with struc-
turing sentences and directing stories is a matter of the fact that
these are all built from just twenty-six letters of the alphabet.
That's it. Just twenty six letters and there are five of them that cost
you something. Just twenty-six letters can result in the com-
binations necessary to create specific meanings. The possibilities
are endless, especially when your breaking rules straightens things
out.
There are explanations in the back of the book about these
things to help get you started. The important thing is that you do it
now, why wait? Some examples for the phonological ambiguities
are: right, rite, write; check, check; rain, reign; etc.
Some of you may be thinking, well gee, these are nice but,
how do they apply to business? Well, I'll tell you that first of all,
when you think about all the words you say all day long anyway
and how many sentences, then are you really getting the biggest
bang for your buck?
We had this woman in one of our business seminars, her boss
sent her. Now she came because she wanted to be able to increase
her rate of collections against their receivables and this was a pro-
fessional office, like a dentist, or chiropractor, or something. Well,
anyway, what she started doing is: when the client was ready to
leave, looks at them, puts out the palm of her hand and starts to
open the appointment book as she says, "We need a check ... on
PRECISION ELICITATION 83
your next appointment." She holds her hand out while she's look-
ing through the appointment book. Now the clients ask "How
much do I owe you today?" She tells them, they write out the
check and they make another appointment all at the same time.
She's been doing this now for about four years and she's absolutely
delighted with it and so is her boss. Hey, receivables are down,
so's the phone bill, by the way, and business is up because people
are also making their next appointment. The state is that most of
them are already feeling pretty good at that time because they're
relieved of whatever pain they were in, etc. The point is that she is
being more successful beyond what she thought possible and she
thinks it's great. The humor of it alone keeps her going and she's
been finding more ways to use humor by using ambiguities more
and more every day. So much for serious business techniques.
Then generate some syntactic ambiguities. Generate as many
as you can at any one time, Maybe fifty or more and write them
down. I like organizing principals. Some of these will be using
phonological ambiguities. So come up with as many as you can in
as short a time as you can. You can't get enough of this. It's what
humor is all about, not jokes. You know, make those powerful
distinctions between jokes and humor, there is a difference, you
know.
Write down as many scope ambiguities as you can come up
with just like the others. These are really useful in this business
because of the way you can use these to change meaning elegant-
ly. There are lots of well known ones out there that are really good
examples, as one liners like, "I caught an elephant in my pajamas."
This one guy I know sold this big ticket item to a woman wearing
red shoes and glasses. Things have never been the same with
either of them. Write down as many as you can in as a short a
period a time as possible. By now you're probably noticing that
84--------------------------------------------------PERSUASION ENGINEERING™
you're using combinations of ambiguities already. Have fun!
See, I want you to think about selling trance as how to com-
municate using the fullest range of possible communicating choic-
es. Punctuation ambiguities are next and here is what I want you to
do: as you write these down use all the ambiguities and keep the
punctuation ambiguity going in the right direction is easy when
you think about racing cars and ideas since the time goes by now I
want you to realize that your investing in your future now and then
some more.
So write, again, so this time you're finding it easier and easier
to use more and more flexibility in how you say what you say
because we want to move on to some of the other patterns here.
Use rhythm, a have fun attitude, a full range of voice inflection,
subtlety, and remember, it's not about being slick, that's easy.
Persuasion is about helping people make the right decision.
Now because you want to be able to make distinctions in your
brain about moving people in directions and locations of things,
time and space predicates are important and are relative in nature.
For example, I said to you or you said to me that you are going
to do something. Think about something that you are going to do.
And since time doesn't exist except for now, then we represent
time using space.
I was sitting on an airplane one time with this associate and we
were flying back from a business deal in Florida. And I was
reading this book called Using Your Brain For a Change. I was
reading it for the nine millionth time. Well, this guy asked me,
"What are you reading?" And I said, "A book." (Of course, I'm the
one with the attitude.) And I am looking at this here book and he
goes, "So, what's the name of it?" I looked at him and I said,
"Using Your Brain, For a Change." I couldn't resist. And he asked,
"What is it about?" I said, "Well, it's all about learning how to Use
Your Brain For a Change, like for example, suppose you want to
PRECISION ELICITATION 85
make a specific decision about something or you want to be able
to learn how you think in words or pictures and things like that."
And he goes, "You can help me with a decision? I'm going to
make a decision." Now, that was an interesting invitation. So I sat
there and realized that he already made it because he didn't say he
was deciding on something. He said, "So you can help me with a
decision." Which means he can already recognize it as a
nominalization as an event that will already occur and has not yet.
This is what I get to do in business. People say, "You are playing
with words." I go, "Yup. Isn't it great?"
And as I'm reading this thing he says, "You can help me with a
decision?" And I said, "Sure, which one?" And he said, "Well I've
been making this decision now, for a while." And inside my head,
I go, "Right, you've already made the decision. You just haven't
implemented it yet or executed it." But I didn't say that to him. I
said, "Well when you think about this decision, where is it?" Now
by the way, actually his words were, "I'm going to make a
decision," I complete his sentence "happen."
Now, think about something that you are going to do, point to
where it is. Now, think about something you are doing. Point to
where that one is. It's in a different location, isn't it? Closer, big-
ger, brighter?
Well, this guy had an interesting one because here's what I fig-
ured out about how he was doing it. I said to him, "How often
have you been going to make this decision, since whenever you
decided to do it?" And he said, "Oh, a couple of years now." And I
go, "What happens?" He goes, "Well, I'm going to probably be
making it in about two weeks." Two weeks doesn't exist. And I
asked, "Where is it?" And he said, "Well it's . . ." and he showed
me on his timeline the location and he goes, "Well it's right about
here," He moves his hand out at about a 45 degree angle and about
arms length away, the picture of the decision was just beyond
86 PERSUASION ENGINEERING'
where his hand was, you know, just out of reach, so to speak. And
I said to him, "Well let's go to tomorrow just for a moment, in
your mind. Where's the decision?"
Get this, the decision kept moving along each day. He would
move a day and the decision would move a day. Sales people
wouldn't be interested in this. And I said, "And what about the
next day?" He said, "Well, it just seems to go to the next day."
Now it's only because of listening to the way that he sequenced his
sentences and the words that he used, and me actually getting
inside of the way that he was describing it, so I could understand
his experience. This was in a pretty quick moment. This guy's
decision kept moving each day and he kept, according to his
words, "Putting it off." Now to make it even more interesting,
when he showed me this, he kept putting it off his timeline to the
side. This is not a good decision executing place. Have you ever
noticed that? People, whether they're in business or not, make
decisions but don't execute them? I think this is a great strategy for
procrastination and maybe for things that you never really want to
do, but for making things happen? I don't think so.
It's in the language, tonality and the physiology. The thing is to
understand hear where the process is going in the conversation and
what they are describing and whether or not you want them to
consider it now or have them already have had considered it at
another time so that you can now use it as a resource now from
then. Resources, those experiences that include usefulness come
from the past, or is it passed, can be applied in language, espe-
cially since your brain works faster than you think.
So if it's a decision that they think they haven't made, yet,
although they already have and they just don't know it, then having
them think about something when they think they are going to
think about it but doing it now and having already done it is one
way of taking a future experience into the experience of now,
PRECISION ELICITATION 87
enjoying it and having it become a resource. And it is in the lan-
guage.
How many of you get people who go, "Let me think about it
overnight." And once you have already thought about it overnight,
and you look at it and go Mmmmmmmm, you may already say to
yourself, "This is the best thing to do right now." It's just a matter
of knowing how sequencing time and space structures with tag
questions using the question up and command tone down at the
right time. Like anything else you've done, when first you thought
about it and, yet, weren't sure, once you did it, it was easy after
that and you even look forward to doing it again.
It is all in the matter of how you sequence the words. Each
word is just a representation for the process to occur.
So think about it and begin to notice where is later, before,
now, since when, tomorrow, going to, will, have, and all other
temporal predicates. Map out the location and begin to map the
locations that other people use, except map them out in your mind.
I mean, if you carry a map around to draw on for your clients, I
think they'll have some questions. Do it in your mind and you can
even gesture with your eyes to verify that you have the
information right.
Now when you look at their map, you'll see exactly what
they're talking about as they describe their wants, needs, and like-
to-haves and everything else they describe. In some places they
call easy customers "lay downs." This means that the customer
knows just what they want and they're easy to sell to. I think most
people who are buying are like that, it's just a matter of rec-
ognizing it. Ask someone who knows what they want, ask them
what do they need? Then watch them have to switch gears because
of the question, when they don't really have to. Why switch tracks
when it's unnecessary?
There's a fine line between elicitation and installation so make
88 PERSUASION ENGINEERING1
that distinction for yourself as well as when.
When you're eliciting information, pay attention to everything
they're doing. If you're not watching what's going on, opportunity
will go by . . . somewhere else.
We're going to give you some exercises to flex your linguisti-
cability so you'll recognize which information means what more
intuitively. The one thing you can be doing even now, since you
know the specifics of your own business, is to design well formed
questions that specifically target the information you want or need.
Like, when you want to know how much they can spend on their
monthly mortgage, for example, ask them how much they can
spend on their monthly mortgage, not how are their finances. Ask
for the targeted information. The formula is really easy. Write
down the information you want, then ask it back in a question. We
have people in businesses do this all the time. They design
elicitations that are so well targeted that actually are appreciated
by their customers because they speed up the process and make it
easier for everyone. Make it easy, make it powerful.
When you elicit this information, also listen for and watch
what happens to their temporal predicates and their relativity to
space. What's in the present, the future, how far into the future?
How close to right now?
There are some things that are learned easier unconsciously.
Now what I'd like you to do is, I'd like you to try something a little
different. Before you look at your client, what I want you to do is
to stop, and I want you to just put out in front of you, float up in
your mind and look down and see a forty foot puma. Sleek with
big white teeth, black fur, shining, and what I want you to do is, in
your mind, I want you to float down inside of that Puma. Look out
of its eyes. See. And what I want you to do is to put a big
mountain on either side of you and be at the beginning of a ravine
that goes down and way down that ravine, and look at your
PRECISION ELICITATION 89
client down at the beginning of it. I want you to paw the ground
and see them actually lift off of it. I want you to lick your chops
and roar for a minute and feel yourself purr, that purr that says,
"Your ass is mine."
But I'm not hungry just yet. I want you to look on the moun-
tain on either side of you and see electricity crackin' down that
ravine, striking on either side of that client of yours and realize
that the lightning is coming from your fingertips. Now, when you
look down at that client in your mind, right now, my question is,
"Do you feel the same?" The answer most likely is "no", because
most of us haven't spent enough time doing what could be ridicu-
lous mental conditioning. However, every neuron inside of you,
every fiber in your body, every single cell is affected by your atti-
tude. Your attitude is predictably, by the way, a result of the way
in which you view the world. And that's not what you see because
your eyes don't really see the world, they compute what's out
there. You respond off of planning. If you plan to be a wimp, you
will. And many of you have planned that far too well. You know,
if you stop and think inside your mind and feel the muscles of a
big cat, and realize that. . . what I want you to do is to stalk
success. I want you to learn to move one step at a time and look
out of the corner of each eye and realize there's opportunity lurk-
ing at every corner. If you open up your senses the way cats do,
because it's a beautiful thing to watch them move through the
night.
I used to work at a night vision lab and we had night vision
scopes and I used to love and sit, watch with the scope, and watch
a big cat lurk through the night, walking and looking for even the
simplest sound. Breathing in and being able to look as only cats
can. Where they stop, they're completely silent and their fur begins
to float up and when they look at something, . . . they know they
can pounce on it, that when the moment is right, they
90 - PERSUASION ENGINEERING'
jump right in. They never jump until they know enough to make
sure they don't make mistakes. You see, you don't want to be able
to rush ahead in the wrong direction, you want to get just enough
information to be able to moooooovvvve. Now, put inside your
mind the Puma, forty feet high, and while you sleep and dream
each night, you move throughout the day you just went through
and begin to look at it with new eyes to see, "What did I miss?
What more can I learn? How much better can I do this? You begin
to hear and see new things in new ways. (Roar) Cause after all, it
is your own learning that's important.
Now one of the things we're gonna do is I want you to keep
that feeling. You've got your eyes open because there's something
more here to learn, but I want you to learn in a new state. I want
your eyes to really begin to open up and I want you really to begin
to listen.
Now I'll tell you what I want you to do, is I want you to go
find yourself someone, stick in a couple new beliefs: "challenge is
fun;" "you can sell to anybody." And also sell them the belief that
when they go back to where they were, they're gonna make 4
times the amount of money in half the time. No matter what it
takes. Get to it.
Well, some of you went inside and you stopped and you asked
yourself, "How hard can I make this?" And you were quite suc-
cessful. But now it's time to just see if we can make this a little
easier. Things just don't need to be this hard. We need to find
some way of speaking to the part of you that realizes that it just
ain't this difficult. "My goodness, gracious", you go, "Well, it must
be real complicated cause I don't already know it, and the more
you don't know something, the harder it must be. After all, this
guy's a doctor or something."
Actually, I'm Dr. Doctor. And the reason I'm Dr. Doctor is
PRECISION ELICITATION 91
because the Europeans gave me an extra doctorate, they gave me a
doctorate of letters. So if any of you have sick letters, I can fix
them. I remember I went to the presentation. This was supposed to
be like getting an award or an honor or something . . . and I went
to this place, and they handed me a pair of tights. And I said
"What the hell's this for?" and he says, "Well, we dress up just like
we did in the 12th century for graduation." This is from a big uni-
versity, and these people are getting their doctorates, and I said,
"So, when you get all the way through school, they finally dress
you up like a fool. Is that what you're saying?" And they said,
"Well, no. This is really a great honor." And I said, "So you want
me to put on tights, and go out in front of a bunch of people," and
I said, "Where I come from, that has a whole different meaning.
See when one's from San Francisco, it becomes a lifestyle. I know
'em, a lot of my friends have that lifestyle, if they'd offered them
those tights, they'd gone, "Oh blue's just not my color." You know.
I'll tell you one of the things that always cracks me up is you know
what? To show you how the mind works, I'll always be some-
where in the world and there's a guy who's got two teeth in the
front of his mouth and the rest is all space, right? He'll look like he
just climbed out of the movie Deliverance, who'll say, "Well, it
don't bother me if they want to be homosexuals as long as they
don't go after me." Like any decent, self respecting homosexual in
an Armani suit, who won't even let a hair be on him is gonna look
at this guy and say, "Oh, I want him, yeah!" Now the fact that this
guy could even have this question shows me that he has not been
to San Francisco and he has not been in the stores, cause he
wouldn't go into the Armani store, he'd look in there and say "Oh,
there's nothing in there but a bunch of faggots, I wouldn't dare go
in there. Next I'd take my clothes off and try sumpin on, why
they'd be all over me." I don't think so. Now the fact that he can
believe stuff like that means you can get people to believe
92 PERSUASION ENGINEERING'
anything. And that's good if you get to choose.
So I know your unconscious has been close because we've
gone through all kinds of things here, some you know about, and
some you're gonna learn about tonight. Because, when you go
back to wherever it is you're gonna sleep and dream, I want you to
consider at the unconscious level, all the things that you've done
that were successful without really understanding them.
Cause I know your unconscious has just pulled things out
where you've found yourself doing things and you just thought to
yourself, you were just in a mood where things began to click and
work. You had what's called "good days." Well, it's time for you to
begin to grab hold of that feeling, and make yourself believe that
every day's gonna start out a good day and get better. That, when
you sleep and dream tonight, I want your unconscious to be
sorting and searching through your neurosynapsis. Pulling up the
best of things and taking the rest of it, and putting it in the same
place as old phone numbers and old girlfriends and boyfriends ...
in a place where you feel, ooooooooo, "I don't want to do that any-
more."
Because the things you do that work are the foundation of your
success. And the things you add to it, are what make your success
grow. In so far as you can learn to make new tones of voice, use
new phrases, get control of your syntax, your body, your
movements, see new things, hear new things from the people that
you work with, is the range of which you will exceed and excel
into the land of greater wealth, greater satisfaction, more sex, more
fun every day for the rest of your life. Now I don't know if you're
the kind of person that looks forward into your future and sees it
as a wonderful thing and feel like you're gonna drool out of the
corner of your mouth, you can't wait to get to it. Cause you know
you're gonna be able to double the passion with everything in your
life; you're gonna be able to look at the most won-
F
PRECISION ELICITATION ------------------------------------------------------93
derful experience you've had with the person you live with, if you
have one, or if not, maybe you'll go get one. Out there there is
somebody for everybody and you can take that image in your mind
and double and double it again. Never settle for less, and with the
person you live with, remember, when you come home, don't be
caught up in your day. Stop and take a deep breath and when you
open the door, I want you to remember the most wonderful
experience you've ever had with them, pull the image closer, make
it bigger, make it brighter, crank it way up. So that you can always
be more in love and let your imagination run away with you. Now,
tonight, while you sleep and you dream, I want your unconscious
to sort and search, begin to make changes so that your ears open
up 100 times more, your eyes open up and begin to see more. So
that when you wake up bright eyed and bushy minded, ready to
learn new things. Ready to do new things. I want you to leave any
resistance, any case of, as I refer to as, maturity behind. Cause
maturity can be a terrible thing if it gets you to reduce your
behaviors and not have fun at what you do. We're engaged in one
of the most powerful professions on the face of the earth, we get to
take people's minds and make them work better. That's what sales
people do, you get to get people to make better decisions. People
who are negotiators get people to find better solutions, more good
for everyone. Cause the trick is to make everything a win/win
situation. Rather than cutting up a pie, you make more pies. At one
time there was no money, there were no buildings, there were no
cars, there were no ideas. And look how many there are now. So
basically, it must be possible to make more. Start with making
more passion and excitement in your life, open your heart, and the
rest will follow. You will find that your flexibility, your ability to
do everything, if you make it fun, you'll get a lot more done, a lot
quicker, and have time left over to do a lot more of the things in
your personal life that you've
94 ---------------------------------------------------------- PERSUASION ENGINEERING™
always wanted to. There's a whole world out there to play with,
just waiting for you. Be nice to it.
Remember to use good tonality, and everything else will be
easy.
* CHAPTER FIVE:
MENTAL MAPPING
There's this one place where I go, they made it such as a pleas-
ant place for most people to work that people want to go in there
because it's fun. Now there's a notion, how we make things so that
what we do is so enjoyable, that we exude pleasure. Because it's
when you do that on the telephone, what gets somebody to want to
talk to you? Who do you want to talk to on the phone? Cranky
people? Who really likes talking to cranky people other than me?
Cause I want to see how long they can stay cranky. I also like to
be cold calling and you go, "Uh, I have some very bad news." And
they go, "Excuse me, who is this?" And I go, "Is this Mrs. So and
So?" And they go, "Yeah," and I go, "Well, I'm afraid the price on
the sweaters in our store has been lowered, thus removing that
profit margin and I just wanted to know if you were interested in
coming in." And they go, "They've been lowered?" And I go,
"Yeah, it really depresses me. In fact, they've, been cut all the way
in half." And they go, "Well, what depresses you?" and I go,
"Well it took my commission out of it. But we're gonna raise them
back up next week. If you want to wait. And they always go,
"Who is this?" I always hear that, "who is this?" And I go, "Just
no one, never mind." My favorite phrase: "Never mind." What a
great thing. People go, "Well, uh, you know, uh, I have a few
questions about this product, process. You know, so
96 PERSUASION ENGINEERING
you're gonna come into my company and ah, do management
training. Uh, what exactly are you gonna do?" And I go, "Never
mind about that." Here's another one you have got to keep. This is
one of the most powerful phrases in English: "Hold that thought." I
love that one. People go, "So, this is really gonna help us?" And I
go, "Yeah, hold that thought. For the rest of your life. Now. Let's
discuss the terms of this, shall we not? Tag questions. Tag
questions allow you to take anybody who has the tendency, cause
there are a lot of people who can see how wonderful it is, but they
feel they're not ready for it. So, you need to be able to, so to speak,
use both sides of human beings because that's the way they make
decisions. A lot of human beings make decisions by creating
internal conflict. Right. I know you guys don't do that, do you not?
Now, what I'd like you to do, is I'd like to try a little mental
exercise because I like to try everyday to adjust my attitude so that
I can accomplish three things: 1) the reduction of hesitation. It's
directly related to insofar as you can reduce hesitation and just try
things wantonly, is to the degree you're gonna learn new things.
See, for example, most of you won't walk through the mall,
and walk up to people. Somebody picks up a big expensive suit-
case, one of those nice Hartman's, or something, that, when you
look at the price tag, you go, "Ho!", and you let go of it. What I
like to do is walk up to that person and go, "Isn't that a beautiful
suitcase? You know, a suitcase like that, can mean you'll have it
your whole life. If it even gets a scratch in it, they replace it. It's
the most wonderful thing, you know, you could be buying suit-
cases one a year, two a year, three a year—instead of having some-
thing to be proud of that would last your whole life. Do you like
things to last?" It's a great gesture to use with men, by the way.
It's—they'll all go, "Yes, yes, I do," and you go, "Well, hold on to
that thought." And they always go, "Well, how much is that suit-
MENTAL MAPPING 97
case?" and when I go, "I have no idea I don't work here," they go,
"Really?" and they laugh. Salespeople will stand behind me some-
times and when they see that I'm actually selling things, they get
angry. I'm just trying to be helpful. They'll go, "What are you
doing?" And I'll go, "Well, I was just talking about how wonderful
this suitcase is," and they'll literally say to me things like, "Well,
stop it." Yeah, that's right you don't want the universe to be on
your side.
That's when you turn around and you go, "What did you say
your name wasV Temporal predicates. This is something else I
want you to start listening. Because I'm gonna start using them
because people will go, "Oh, man, that's so expensive." And I go,
"Yeah, it really was, wasn't it?" Moves it into the past in their
mind. And I go, "But if you look at it now, you might begin to see
that in relationship to all the qualities it has, it's something you can
feel good now about," Now, using language in this way, it's not
always quite grammatical, but being able to shift when ideas are,
whether they're in the past, whether they're in the future, see I said,
"Well, you know, I don't know whether or not," that's an
embedded question so they don't really get to answer it. They just
get to think of the answer. "I don't know whether or not you can
see yourself dressed in your finest clothes, you know, walking into
a luxury hotel with this beautiful suitcase, or with a ratty old one
with dents in it and stickers all over it. And little tags and tears,
and so that people know you're really just a one-time tourist as
opposed to an elegant traveler. Which image comes to your mind
easiest?"
I don't know about you guys, I travel and it seems like I went
in my garage, scary place, your garage, isn't it? It's proof you can
sell anything to anybody. Isn't it? How many of you don't have the
belief you can sell anything to anybody? Go in your garage and
spend a day in there. Worse yet, some of you have what's
98 PERSUASION ENGINEERING'
called a storage unit.
How many of you have to rent an extra garage for extra stuff?
I do. I have some — I have one I have no idea what's even it in
anymore, it's been too long. Someday, I'm gonna go in there, I'm
afraid, though, but when I do, every time I go into one of these
things, it's like Christmas, although I've discovered I've bought
four more of these since then. That's why I need a storage unit for
these, is because I had to make room for the ones I already had.
I recently moved. It was a trick. My teenagers turned of age,
you know, 18, and they went away for a few days and so I moved.
I thought it was a great idea. I just moved, there's no way I'm
gonna fix that place. It's gone, man, it's beat. Having teenagers,
because you have one teenager and they travel in packs. They
come through and it's been like four years since I've seen the
inside of a refrigerator with food in it. You know, they come in
like locusts. They land in the house and they eat everything in
sight. And, my daughter travels with quite a little band of rene-
gades and they would come into the house. She has friends, my
son named one Sasquatch because she would come in—you could
tell when she would walk into the kitchen, you could feel the floor
"BOOM, BOOM, BOOM" - she'd just take the refrigerator, tilt it up
and glub, glub, glub, glub, like that. You know, I'd go to the store,
buy $300 worth of food, I'd go out and pick up the mail and come
back and there wouldn't be anything but bones on the counter. And
the dog would look at me, point over, and the kibble was gone,
too.
Actually, I'd bought these little dog burger things because my
dog is small and I bought these little dog burger things, and they
were in a box, and the box got wet so I took them out and I stuck
'em in the refrigerator. It seemed like the thing to do. Right? Well,
I discovered the kids really like these things. And they're not that
expensive, right? And it seems to fill them up a lot
MENTAL MAPPING 99
because I guess they have a lot of bone marrow and stuff in there.
So I started buying 'em and putting 'em in plastic bags and putting
'em in the refrigerator, and when, one day, my daughter was in
there and she was frying one up, actually she was frying three up,
one for her and two for her friends, Sasquatch, you know, and they
had the buns out and they were putting stuff on there, and I walked
in and I said, "Are you making hamburgers?" and I looked in the
pan and I said, "Oh, if you were making hamburgers I was gonna
have one." And they looked at me and I said, "That's dog food."
And they looked at me, checked it out, and they said, "You're such
a liar, you're always saying that, get out of here." And I said,
"Okay, never mind. So this is what you want to eat?" and she said,
"Just get out, out out out."
Of course I moved. I was tired of eating doggy burgers.
Actually, they wouldn't even leave the doggy burgers in there. I
get this kind of stuff a lot because since my dog's small, just as a
ritual, sometimes I like to heat the dog's food up, you know,
because you can con them into eating stuff easier that way. You
know, you can just take the dog food, throw it in a pan, with a lit-
tle water, you can put a little garlic powder on it, you know, a little
salt and pepper, and the dog goes, "Hey, it's human food. Give me
that. I don't want the dog food. I'll take that stuff, the stuff with the
garlic powder on it, yeah, yeah, the stuff like you make for
yourself." And I go, "Oh, no, you can't have this, get away." You
know, you have to play these games, because dogs are pretty
smart, you know. Humans, you can just go, eat it, yum, but you
tell the dog to eat it, it looks up at you and goes, "(sniff, sniff,
sniff) ... I want what you have." Because especially if you serve
food when you're eating, you know, the dog goes (sniff, sniff) he
goes, "This is much better." But if you put garlic powder on it, you
can fool them, you know. That's because I put a lot of garlic on
everything. You have to when you have teenagers, because the
100 PERSUASION ENGINEERING'
only stuff left in the refrigerator looks more like a biology project
than anything else. I don't know what the other thing is. There's
some genetic phenomenon with teenagers, where a half inch of
milk always gets left in the carton. You ever notice that? Just that
much. And orange juice, too. There's always that much, so that
they don't have to have the responsibility of taking the carton and
putting it in the garbage. And mine, the garbage thing is right next
to the refrigerator because, usually when I get there there's just
bones and wrappers and I like to have it be close.
That's what happens. There you are, your teenagers, they were
so nice and so cute when they were small and then they come and
take all of your money and your car. Right? I even had three cars,
two teenagers. I'd get up and there wouldn't be one. Figure that
out. They'll loan one of your cars to their friends. You'll get up in
the morning, have nothing to drive, nothing to eat and no money.
You do that for a couple of years, things get tense, plus, there's
this genetic thing where they can make nonverbal signals that
make you go insane inside your head. They go, "ble-hhh," and
suddenly your body goes (wkejejrjerjzzzzz) and you hear yourself
saying stuff your parents said to you. It's really frightening, it's
what told me anchoring works. And then there's my daughter, who
taught me arm levitation. Where I could reach back and grab a
hold of my wallet, let it float involuntarily out. You know. It's like
I'd see the money disappear and I'd say, "What am I doing? I must
be in a trance," you know, the extraction trance. That's the same
one I induce other people in and I come home and they can take it
from me. I'm just an intermediary between my daughter, my dog
and the world. Think about it. Now I know probably some of you
are laughing because this is so true.
But just think that it's your job to go back and help others.
Like they have dogs, cats and children, too.
MENTAL MAPPING 101
Now, remember I want you to begin to make changes so that
your ears open up 100 times more, your eyes open up and begin to
see more. Start with making more passion and excitement in your
life, open your heart, and the rest will follow. Make it fun, you'll
get a lot more done, a lot quicker, and remember to use good
tonality, and everything else will be easy.
There's a list of something that seems to me to be a synopsis of
most sales forces. And I talked about needing a road map, that
there are certain things that most people don't pay attention to,
when they're in the activity of engineering influence.
One is that you can't do it if you don't have their attention. You
skip over that phase. And when I say attention, I mean their full
attention. I've seen too many times, and too many situations,
people start babbling away to somebody who is staring at some-
thing, who is not listening. And, when you do that, you're not able
to influence them, especially at the unconscious level. I think of
sales, I think of negotiation as a by product of skills of the hyp-
notists. And if you don't think of it that way, you'll discover that
you make a lot less money, so for those of you who are interested
in making less money, keep it up. For those who are not, then the
thing to do is to realize that when you get somebody's attention,
that it's okay to let them just stare at something and wait, until you
have them.
Because any form you can get their attention in is fine. I tried
something. These guys that worked in this car lot there, that had
worked there for years in their seats, and they had a job much like
the people at Xerox. The people at Xerox, what they had to do in
order to sell something was to lift the phone, for years. All they
had to do was pick up the phone and go, "Okay, you want five."
They'd pick up the phone again, and go, "Oh, yes, okay, you'd like
10." Because, there was the only Xerox machine, their copier was
the largest selling product in the history of the US.
102 PERSUASION ENGINEERING1
Interestingly enough, when the gentleman developed it, it took
him 15 years to get somebody to finance mass marketing it
because of the following comment, "Well, if people want to copy,
they'll just use carbon paper." Really, do you know how many
people probably went out and shot themselves when those things
hit the market? People consumed them like wild fire. Now what
happened was, at a certain point in time Xerox lost its exclusivity
over the technology.
Finally, the patent ran out and every Japanese company on the
face of the earth made a copier. And the guys at Xerox were sitting
in their offices, staring at the phone, and it wasn't ringing. And it
wasn't going to ring. Now, one of the things that happened is that
Xerox then went out and spent a fortune, and I mean a fortune,
getting some of the most "brilliant," here was the problem,
psychologists on the face of the earth. These are people who've
never sold anything in their lives. They, then, designed a big sales
course. Now, I attended that course, and many others. I went
around, you see, I wanted to find out what people knew about.
There was nothing inside of the entire course, which by the way
started off with a one-day, then they had a three day, then they had
a week, then they had month. Special training, if you were gonna
get really advanced. In all the courses there was not one thing
about listening. There was not one thing that told you anything
that you could actually do. There wasn't anything to give you,
anyway, which is the third tier of what I want to know, when you
had done anything, either.
There were ways of evaluating a person's personality, as if, by
the time somebody walks in a room, and looks at copy machines
up there, you're gonna be able to influence them, or go into a store
and sell them your copiers versus others, or a business. Because at
this time, businesses were being deluged with these personality
things.
MENTAL MAPPING 103
I had this consulting company once and there was this recep-
tionist there. And this client came up and, you know, when you
have clients like we had, you had to be real careful and the guy
came up and had no appointment, and had a big bag of literature
under his arm. That's always how you tell a nut, by the way. They
have a lot of writing with them cause no one wants to listen to
them. He came up to the door and said, "I'm here to see Bandler
and I'm not leaving until I do." And he sat down, in the reception
area and everybody that came by, he was looking at them with
wild eyes and writing madly and finally spread stuff on the floor
and she asked some of the other people I had working there to help
because they'd all come in and they would look at this stuff, and
she would ask them, "Say, can you handle this?" And they would
go, "I'm busy right now," and go in the other room." My office, by
the way, wasn't in the same building. I found if it was, they'd
pester me all the time. So I had one up the street with video
cameras in the building, and I used to just sit up there and watch
them all. It was great. So I'd been watching this all morning long
because I was fascinated with this. I thought this was good.
Well, this lady decided that somebody has to deal with this
guy, so she told him, she said, "Gather up your things and follow
me." And she took him into the back, and all the way back in and
into the office of the person who at that time was running that par-
ticular division of the company, had him set all his stuff down,
because they had an office big enough to spread it out on the
floors, and left him there alone. Now I'm watching on the video
cameras, and as soon as the door closes, I mean it was like light-
ning, this guy was in the filing cabinets. He pulled out the cases of
all the clients that we'd had for years. And then he noticed a big
knife and picked it up.
Well, the guy turned around and there was a big mirror in the
104 ------------------------------------------------PERSUASION ENGINEERING™
room. And I don't know if he was trying to decide whether to kill
himself or one of us, but it seemed to me that when you have an
estranged, wild human being, the thing that you don't do, espe-
cially one who doesn't have an appointment, isn't really your
client, the thing you don't do is arm them. It's not like step #1, with
clients, arm them. Step #2, bear your chest. I used the primitive
approach. I called a friend of mine at the Santa Cruz police
department and the guy came down and I gave him the keys to the
back door to that office and he went up by the door and knocked
on it, and then I, told him, I said, "All you have to do is tap on the
door, and then step aside and then tap on the door, and go, 'Oily,
Oily, Oxen Free.'" And the guy opened the door, actually it was
nice he put the knife down first. He opened the door, I was watch-
ing on the cameras because I sure as hell wasn't going down there.
I've seen these people before, you know. It's fine when they're
locked up or chained down or something. But when they're armed,
you want somebody else who is armed. They pulled this guy off,
handcuffed him, and while they were dragging him away, he's
waving his hands around wildly, even though he was cuffed. They
finally had to cuff him hand and toe, and drag him away. They
brought him down, booked him and then in the interest of justice,
of course, the courts arraigned him and OR'd him in less than an
hour. And, in an hour and 15 minutes, he was back. Now, she
decided, well, obviously the police aren't gonna help, so, what she
did is she started calling the other people that she thought were just
as nutty and having them come down, too. We were gonna have a
convention. I don't know where this idea came from, I mean what
could she have been thinking, because I had a file called nuts.
And these were the people that I just didn't want to deal with
because, they weren't there to get help, they were there, because
they wanted us to join in what conspiratorial phenomenon was
MENTAL MAPPING 105
going on in their mind. For example, there was one person who
was convinced that, actually, I was not from this planet, and that
all this Neuro-Linguistic Programming — was a way of program-
ming the whole world to enslave it. And the first time he showed
up he showed up with a big shot gun. And that's, by the way, why
I had my office down the street. He kicked in the front door, he's
got the shotgun, and went, "We must all kill him. We have to
overthrow him," and began unloading rounds in the building. That
time she called the police right away, but now she called him back.
The idea is to get rid of people like this primarily because they
don't have any money. You know, if you're gonna see them, I want
to see them in a safe environment. I want to go into a nice mental
hospital where I can scare the hell out of them. Not the other way
around. Now, the other thing that she did is she did something,
that I thought was interesting. I told her, "I want to have a
representative from one of these copier companies come in here."
She popped open the phone book and called every single one of
them. And gave them all the same appointment. She buzzed me,
and she said, "Can you see them at 11?" And I said, "Sure." And I
said, "What company are they from?" And she said, "Copying
company." I said, "Okay." Suddenly there's this entourage,
because I had a big iron gate in front of my office, and I heard
(thirp, thirp) and I turned on the cameras and here out in front are
these human beings. And they all had brief cases, and a wild look
in their eye. And I thought, "Oh, this is gonna be good. Nuts,
again." So I buzz and I said, "What do you want?" And they all
started waving brochures in the air. So I let them into the lobby, I
made them all sit down and I said, "Who the hell are you people?"
One guy was from Xerox, he was the one that barely breathed. He
sat there like he was depressed. Because after all he learned selling
the psychological approach. And then there were all these other
guys.
106 PERSUASION ENGINEERING1
There were guys who knew nothing about copy machines, but
boy they knew how to sell and they knew, in a crowd, he who
squeaks the most gets the oil. And there was one guy, who is just
screaming. Finally, one guy out of all of them does something
unusual, because they were all trying to talk at the same time, and
I told them to shut up and I asked them, "Why are you all here?"
and they said, "Well, because you need a copy machine." And I
said, "Well, what did we do, run off copies of the salesman, what's
the story here?" And this one guy, just sat there, casually unbut-
toned his shirt, took it off, unbuttoned his pants and walked over in
his shorts. "I'm trying to get your attention." And I said, "You got
it. Almost got it anyway." Well, I figured somebody who was
enthusiastic . . . Now, I actually got a copy machine from this guy
because I liked his style. Out of 17 guys there, all there with their
briefcases, massive brochures, shuffling through their brochures
and stuff. Most of them were more interested in the brochures than
they were in me. This guy didn't have anything with him. He said,
"It's in the car." He said, "Let's go to lunch, it's too crowded here."
I like that, I thought that was good. Suddenly an idea dawned on
my mind. I decided that, for my little hobby that I did a couple
days a week, I would try some things that were out of the ordinary,
to see if I could get some attention. Because after all, this is not a
good time to be selling cars.
By the way, even though I'd gathered up some people from the
country club and the Toyota lot, which was across the street. They
didn't like me much. I tried things like I went out and I got myself
one of those little yellow jackets, like the guys that worked on the
roads do. One of those little stop signs. "Slow." And I went out
and I'd stand on the road with the sign and wave them down.
Especially if I saw a Volvo. Because at the time, that's when Volvo
was going through the law suits about being lemons. And, there
was a lot of truth to that. I had a friend, who had at the time a
MENTAL MAPPING 107
Volvo, and even the glove box didn't work on this thing. It was
that, the Jaguars, too. You could always just walk up to anybody,
anywhere in town as they were getting into a Jaguar and just look
at them and go, "How depressing," and they'd go, "What?" And I'd
go, "You must spend a lot of time in the shop." And they'd go,
"Yeah," and I'd go, "Doesn't it grate on you?" He'd be down there
in moments, and I'd just go up there — there's a parking lot about
three blocks up — and I'd walk up and it seemed like that's where
the cars were. I'd go and see who looked at their car, and when
they looked at it like they wanted to have it out with it. Then I got
another idea. I thought, "Gee, who do people really trust?" because
for me always in the second stage and all of these kinds of sales
things. It says establish rapport. I thought, "Uuuuum," Because,
once you have somebody's attention you should be able, without
being a rocket scientist, to know if you have their full attention.
The trick is to notice if you are more concerned over your
brochures or this or that.
I recently decided I wanted to buy a four wheel drive vehicle.
So what I did is, in my ignorant way of doing things, I went out
and rented each one for a week, until I decided which one I liked. I
went down to the dealership, and this is an unusual opening line, I
walked in through the door, looked at the one I wanted, the
salesman walked over to me and said, "Excuse me, what are you
doing here?" And I looked at him and said, "I'm after your job."
And he said, "What?" And I said, "Where's your boss?" And he
said, "Well he's back there behind the window." I said, "Wait
here." And I went in and then his boss came out and fired him.
Smart guy, because this guy's idea of establishing getting your
attention was to piss you off. Now, I don't recommend that that's
the way that you go about it, because when you piss people off
and attach it to you, it doesn't work well. However, if you piss
them off and aim it in the right direction it can be useful.
108 PERSUASION ENGINEERING'
Now one of the things, that I want to teach you is a little trick,
that I've learned through the years as I went through any kind of a
sales pitch, whatsoever, and I started to get some flak from them,
that when I could tell things weren't going good. It didn't matter,
whatever it was. I always would get out of my chair and I would
turn around and I'd say, "Now that's what you normally hear from
a salesman." and I'd go, "that kind of activity." And I'd point back
towards the chair, "It's that kind of shit that really annoys you,
isn't it?"
People go, "Yeah. It is." And I'd turn around and I'd go, "Now,
the other companies around here, that sell cars, you've probably
been to a few of them, think about them. That's the kind of thing
you're gonna get there." Because any time you get a negative
response like that, you want to make sure you drop back and
immediately disassociate it from you and associate it with some-
thing else. I picked the Toyota lot because there was a big window
there. And I actually got people so pissed off now and then, that
when people would leave they'd stop over there and yell at people.
I do like doing things. They'd go across the street and they'd walk
up to one of the guys and flip them the bird. And they'd walk
away. And all the guys in the Toyota lot would look at each other,
and they'd look in the window over there. And they'd go, "What
the hell do they tell people?" I even had one guy walk over and he
walked in and he said, "What the hell are you telling people about
us?" he said, "This guy just came over there and cussed me out."
And I said, "The truth. You were trying to kill their children." And
they'd go, "I didn't try and kill anybody's children." And I said,
"You try and sell those collapsible cars, don't you?"
Now at that time I want to tell you, because I know somebody
that had a Toyota Corolla, and it was parked by the side of the
road, and next to the road there was a small embankment that went
down about ten feet, and then there was a driveway which
MENTAL MAPPING 109
had come off on an angle. The ground was a little wet, the tires
sank down and the car rolled slowly down and landed on the dri-
veway, and was totaled. Flattened like a pancake. I know, it was
my car. Somebody gave it to me, when they went to Europe, to
drive. When they came back, they weren't happy. Now when I saw
a car crush like that, suddenly, what dawned in my mind, most
people would've said, "Oh, I crushed my friend's car," I thought to
myself, "I could use this as a selling technique." So I had the car
delivered down and we put it outside in front of our place. A
flattened crushed Toyota Corolla and I went down to the theatrical
supply house and got myself a mannequin, some blood paint and
put it inside with an arm sticking out. And then I got two small
dolls from a toy store all right and had them laying out and a little
sign that said, "Think about it. Is it worth it?" The Toyota people
hated that. Because anybody that was going into the Toyota lot,
when they turned around they'd look and see us over there and
there it was, with the arms hanging out and everything and on the
side it said, "Get your hands on a Toyota," which was their slogan
at the time. Now, I want to tell you that the guy that owned the
Toyota lot just got into it with the guy that owned the place that I
was volunteering my time to. They actually had such a big fight
about it, that they made me remove it. But I just thought it was just
kind of a flexis billboard. The flexis art is living art, it's where life
becomes art. And to me, I always figured the best form of
advertisement is any flexis art you can create, that it builds in its
own message. That I know, for example, here are things that strike
me as not good business. For example, the guy that owned the
Toyota lot, drove a Mercedes. That's a gift from the gods.
You film that and show it in your show room. I mean, to me,
this is good advertisement. This is where life imitates itself. If he's
afraid to drive one, how come he's willing to sell one to you,
110 PERSUASION ENGINEERING1
because he hates you? That's why they go over there and get mad.
I go, "He's willing to have your children die, while he feeds off
them. He laughs at people like you." I've gotten people so pissed
off, they went over in force sometimes. They moved the Toyota lot
across town. I'm not kidding. He said he was planning to get a
new, bigger place because they were doing so well. Or at least had
been.
Now, when I set the idea of competition ... to me, because I
don't think there is a limit to the amount of things to go around. I
know that when they put a whole bunch of car lots in one place,
they all sell more cars than when they've put one out in the middle
of nowhere. That your ability to realize that you know there is no
limit in the number of things, but when it comes down to pure
competition . . .
To me I view it as fun. Other people view it as stress. From the
standpoint of stress, you can't do business. To me, I view clients as
food, because that's what they are. When they come in to buy
something, when it's the matter of who is going to get this money,
it's different than "is it possible?" Because, for me, I was selling
cars to people who weren't planning to buy one. Most of the time
I'd drive down and I'd go, "Now, where would be a good place to
sell cars?" And I'd go, "Repair places."
Find people who are frustrated out of their mind and tell them
they can dump more money into this hunk of junk, or they could
feel wonderful. Do you want to feel wonderful or do you want to
feel bad? Think about it. Now most of them didn't say to me,
"Well I really want to feel bad." Actually I would've had a ten-
dency to amplify their bad feelings. Nothing personal. But I found
that if I turned them up just enough . . . because I like to ask things
like, "I wonder if you can imagine what will break next?"
I went down to a place that specialized in foreign cars one
MENTAL MAPPING 111
evening and for a small price and a few cocktails, I managed to get
the guy to go through and give me all of the repair reports on
Volvos and Jaguars and a few other cars; big giant receipts and just
on one car, where it was just one right after the other after the
other. And I xeroxed those files so that I could walk up to people
and I'd go, "Is this your Volvo?" And they'd go, "Yeah." And I'd
go, "How old is it?" And they'd go, "Well you know, it's two, three
years old." And I go, "Oh, it's just about to start." And they go,
"What?" And I go, "Well, have you had any repairs recently?" And
I said, "I'd like to show you what's going to happen. I'd like you to
know what your future is going to be like." And I'd show him the
file. Some of these cars, it was unbelievable. . . there was one that
spent over 200 days in the repair shop. Think about it. . . 200 days
. . . that's like, you get to visit your car on weekends. I know. I had
a Jaguar and I actually got to the point where it was either me or
the car, one or the other. I didn't even sell it. And I got the personal
satisfaction of burning it. I did. Drove it off a cliff and burned it. I
decided no car would ever make me feel that way again, It wasn't
about money anymore, it was personal. I know that the car did it to
me because it wanted to because it wouldn't break down. When I'd
leave, it would always break down half way there. Not only that,
but it would do it in the most demeaning of ways. It would do it in
a place where you couldn't pull over. It would do it in a place
where I knew it was a personal thing.
Now the other sales people that were down at this place told
me the kinds of things that I was doing were not professional. And
I said, "Quite to the contrary," I said, "Anybody that doesn't vary
their behavior to find out how to generate more business and find
out what they do is not going to do well, they'll be like you." Now
while I am down there, because, of course, the guy that owned the
place is not going to get rid of me at this point because I am the
only one selling anything, right? And that's because I will
112 PERSUASION ENGINEERING1
go to just about any limit just to find out what will work.
Well when I was down at the costume store, bringing back the
stuff after they made me remove the Toyota, there it was in radiant
luxury, just sitting out there on the stand. It came to me all at once:
"establish rapport." There was a catholic priest outfit and I thought,
"Trust, it's built in." What could be better? "Bless you, my
children, for you need a car." Now, I never told anyone I was a
catholic priest, I just put it on. And then I'd walk up to people and
I'd go, "Me lassie, you seem to be having a wee bit of trouble with
the car." That's when it went wild. I said, "Just tell me your
troubles." "Ah I can't afford big payments." "Well, we'll work it
out for you. I'm sure we'll find some way. You know, I've got a
friend down here, who will take care of you." And you know, I've
never had anybody ask even after we went down and I showed
them the car. I gave them a good price, gave them a good deal,
right? Set them up and I would send them in the other room and
they'd sign them up on paper. They would always come out and
go, "Thank you, father." And I'd go, "It's all right, me lassie, don't
you worry. If you have any problems you bring it back right here."
You know what? I thought the guys that worked at this place were
going to flip because they knew I was Jewish.
And the one guy told me that it was a sacrilege and I said, "It's
a costume, for Christ's sake." I said, "Everybody rents them," I
said, "except these guys rent these costumes at Halloween." So I
went back to the costume store and started going, "What else? Can
I see that policeman's uniform there?" Maybe we'll try . . . oooooh,
look at that there, I'll try one of those." Because what I wanted to
do, was for me, I was just trying to learn to find out what lengths
you could go to. I mean, to me, if you don't vary your behavior,
you don't try things, you don't find out what will work.
I tried things. For example, I tried stand up in a night club
MENTAL MAPPING 113
because the band took a break and I just walked up to the micro-
phone and I said, "I know that you are all here for the meeting, and
I want to know how many of you are just sick and tired of the gas
prices thing?" And everybody goes, "Yeah." I said, "How many of
you just really want to get a good car anyway?" People would go,
"Yeah," and I said, "Well, those of you who are interested I want
you to see me in the back."
I picked up fifteen people in one night. I just went there to
have drinks. The guy asked me to come in and play for a few tunes
that night with him, an old friend. He said, "I know that you don't
play much, why don't you get down and play a few songs." I
played a few songs and sold fifteen cars. They had to come down
the next day and picked up their Cadillacs. I only brought pictures
with me. I had names for the cars, too. I found out that was the
easiest way to sell a used car, is to have a name for it. You per-
sonalize things, right? You know, I'd show them and I'd say, "See
this Lincoln? This is Barbara." And I'd go, "I like Barbara." You'd
be surprised, you know, ten o'clock, eleven o'clock at night in a
cocktail lounge, you could sell just about anything.
One time, the high way patrolman, who was a friend of mine,
was doing a thing inside the schools and I, at the time, was doing a
project. I took all the educationally handicapped children, because
I have a personal pet peeve about this stuff. And I took all of them
in one school for one week and moved them to the top of their
class. This pissed the teachers off because they would give them
tests like the others, and they had their bright little bright kids, and
I went around and screwed them all up. I did that at recess, it was
easy. It's really not that hard, you know. You just walk up to them,
lift their arm up and tell them to close their eyes and say, "The
next time you get a spelling test you won't be able to make images.
You'll just sound everything out." They did that to some of you,
didn't they?
114 PERSUASION ENGINEERING1
Those of us that learned to spell phonically, and you know, I
love that, when you go up and ask how to spell a word, and they
tell you to look it up in a dictionary. If I knew how to spell it, I
wouldn't need a damned dictionary. And they made it sound all so
important, and how many of you now have a button on your
computer that you can press? Take your mouse and go "spelling"
and bam! it's over. Except that if you spell it like another word the
computer will go, "oh that's fine" and then in one of those sen-
tences I walked down the street Fine, it was fine. Well that's
because computers can't make the distinction. Your mistake must
be gross or not at all. So those of you who spell pretty well actu-
ally have more trouble using the spelling program because you
will misspell and it will be spelled like another word. Those of us
that learned how to spell phonetically can use these computers
because when we do it, most of the time, the computer goes, "I'll
be damned if I know what that is. Can you try another version for
me?"
Now, the thing that happened with the high way patrol, which
I thought was beautiful, is that, here I am working with these kids.
They came down and they asked me, they said, because I'd had
some interaction with the police and they also knew that I drank,
and that I was good at it. I'm one of the few people that actually
smuggled a bottle of vodka into jail. I went to visit somebody, we
were working on a legal case and I asked the guy, "Can I bring you
anything?" And he said, "Yeah," he said, "Bring me a bottle of
vodka." So I did. And they never did figure out where I hid the
bottle of vodka, because before we went in, I was working with the
lawyer. They searched us, they searched everything, and when
they found the empty bottle of vodka in there and him singing
away, it wasn't very discrete. I thought he was going to use it over
a period of time. I didn't know he was going to drink it all at once.
But, they asked me, they said, "You know, you got
MENTAL MAPPING 115
patted down. You weren't carrying anything with you. Where did
you hide the bottle of vodka?" And I said, "In my hands." And
they said, "That's absolutely impossible." And I said, "No, it's
not." The next time I went there, when I left he had another bottle
of vodka. Now, it was so easy. All I did was took cardboard and
made it look like a thermos. It even had a top that you could take
off.
That I'd taken off another thermos, and had hot coffee in it.
They'd open it up and there was hot coffee and it was only this big.
And I put plaster of paris and a bottle of vodka underneath it.
Smuggling seemed like a challenge to me. I modeled those guys
with the CIA, too. But, it was real interesting working with those
people because I got to ask them all kinds of questions and stuff.
They have, by the way a rather interesting sales program: "Do
what we want or we'll kill you." Um, which works for me. I
become very flexible. I mean just tell me what you want. And they
go, "We can't. It's a secret, now give it to us."
I want to begin to train your eyes. To begin to notice things.
One way is, I'm going to ask you, whatever it is that you sell, and
if you don't sell anything, make something up ... I'm going to ask
you to go into the phase where you start to notice the sign posts
that tell you when you have somebody's attention and the question
is, when have you? . . . because I like to ask them questions. I've
always told people that I was a decision engineer because, if you
said you were a sales person, it's a negative anchor. And you say,
"Oh yeah, there's plenty of sales people around here," I said, "You
can see them sitting over there in their suits. You know what they'll
try to do to you." And they go, "Yeah, I know what you mean." I
go, "Well, I'm the decision engineer here. See, I'm only here to
find out how you make good decisions." Now begin to ask them
questions about the difference between the good decision and a
bad decision. But while you are doing this I want you to
116 PERSUASION ENGINEERING
breathe at the same rate they are breathing. I want you to talk in
roughly the same rate that they do, and if they are using a lot of
visual words, use a lot of visual words.
But this is the most important thing. As you start to do this, I
want you to shift and begin to speak at the rate that they are
breathing. You can feel that hit you like a drum can't you? Even a
few seconds of it like that, and something inside you goes, "Wow!
Yeah, right." Because contrary to popular belief, people like to be
influenced, if you do it well. Think about it. When somebody
seduces you, they're influencing you. And if they do it well, it
feels good, doesn't it? Now, if they do it badly, it feels like shit,
right. For example, last night, out of my hotel room window, their
was a bunch of guys standing on the corner and every time a car
would drive by with a woman in it, they'd go, "yo baby." Now do
they really think that that's going to work? I don't think so, for
some reason. I can't see women going, "Oh, put the brakes on,
man." Then there were guys driving by in cars doing the same
thing, yelling at the women that were walking down the street.
Like you know, the woman's going to take out a grappling hook
and get that bumper and slow them down.
See the trick is to notice that you are going to get a positive
state. The problem is, you can't get one if you are not in one. I see
people and they drive down the freeway, and it stresses them out.
Me, I look at all the buildings full of money, going, "It will be
mine." See, you need to be able to go inside and make sure that
your tonality is pleasant and that you access wonderful states and
then, when you mirror somebody and you begin to speak at the
rate that they are breathing, then they are going to start feeling
better than they've felt before. They are going to go, "I'm starting
to feel good."
Because at that moment in time, I'm going to ask you to do
something, which is, I want you to begin to mirror them, you're
MENTAL MAPPING 117
already breathing at the same rate. But what I do is I just start
smiling and if they smile, like you ... As a matter of fact, you
know, I still have a Lincoln and I know you've been thinking about
it, ever since I started talking about it. I mean it's got those big
leather seats, and I love those buttons to roll down the window and
you know, I put a big cattle horn on the front of mine. A six cattle
horn that says get out of my way or your screwed. Never mind.
You wouldn't want to keep that powerful state, would you? "Come
to me Barbara, come to me." I want to introduce you to Barbara.
She will change your life.
It's just something about those big Lincoln's, you know. People
go, "Why do people buy those big gas guzzlers?" Because they
weren't driving, that's why. I didn't drive very far. I drove thirteen
miles to work and thirteen miles back and every once in a while I
stopped at a bar. Stopping doesn't use any gas at all. I found that
the more I was stopped the less gas I used. It always amazes me,
when people are stuck in traffic, bumper to bumper, they let their
engines run. Not me, I turn mine off and get out of the car and go
knock on people's windows. Start passing out literature. It's like
that thing about that airline where they strap them down, I think
that's great. I walk up and down and I look and I go, "They're all
strapped down. This is great! Good! Break out the product. . .
we've got them." You just go and hand shake interrupt with each
one of them. They are just sitting there on the plane.
Now, what I want you do is to start playing with this, because
what you are after, is looking. The goal of this exercise, that you
are about to do, is to look. Oh yeah, there's an exercise here. I'm
going to teach you, by the way later on, the contract interrupt
technique. It's much like a hypnotic technique that was used by
Milton. He did something called the hand shake interrupt to get
people into trance. I do the contract interrupt. I usually like to
118 PERSUASION ENGINEERING
start out my sales pitches by having them sign the contract and
then I do the sales pitch. I find it works much easier that way. And
the look of fear on their face. They've already signed it, but they
don't know why. But I have it in my hand and then what I do is, I
slowly start to rip it up as I convince them, that they want it. It's an
interesting polarity. I don't actually rip it up, just that carbon stuff
around the edge. But its a way of being able to induce a state, by
which you can get people to act as if the contract is for service of
the product. And so you can tell whether or not you will ever get
any buyer's remorse. It's a test.
Because to me, I just blatantly get people's attention. Then
what I do. I find a way of knowing if I have rapport. This is the
important point about having a road map that tells you where you
are. I know when I have their attention by the look on their face.
That's one way to know.
For example, the zipper technique. You ask yourself, "What is
the zipper technique?" Let your imagination run wild and you'll
have one, too. This is what I am after, your ability to begin to think
of, "What can I do?" Because, if you are in a situation and you're
not getting someone's attention, the term is "escalate." Now,
there's the heart attack technique. That one works really good.
That's where you keep a little thing with pills in your shirt pocket.
You just need candy ones, you don't need real pills, and some of
you've done this, haven't you? And then I used this in the furniture
store, because people walk too fast in furniture, like they are
looking for a specific couch. Right? Like, you can't make them
look at another one. Or you can't change the fabric and they zoom
back and forth. But you are going to have the exact one sitting out
and as they walk by, you suddenly go, "Uh uyh uh arrrrgh." You
know, if they save your life they have to buy something from you.
I don't know why, but they do. It's some unwritten law.
MENTAL MAPPING 119
Now, about the exercise. The exercise is simply to start to
pitch somebody on something but to concentrate yourself on mak-
ing sure you follow the following rules: Do not know what you are
going to say before you say it; so that you hear your voice coming
out of your mouth. Remember you can always change it. And I
want you to ask questions. And the kind of questions I want you to
ask, first are the ones that get people to ramble. I want you to see if
you can throw in at least three rhetorical questions by which you
would get a yes. You know, you do want to be happy, don't you?
And they go, "Yeah." And you go, "Well, you want to enjoy your
life and you know, that if you buy just the right thing and make
just the right decision, then you'll enjoy yourself, won't you?" Tag
questions are always the way of getting a good rhetorical response.
And I realize I'm asking you to do a number of things at the same
time, but that's because, if you can't, you ought to go out and get a
real job, like being a social worker. Something where you don't
need skills. Something where, your tenure of being a school
teacher . .. They do this in the US: if you can work somewhere for
three years you have a job for life. But you know, the quality of
the education in the US is directly disproportionate to the fact that
school teachers don't have to get any better at what they do, right?
They don't have to produce results. On the other hand, those of us
who are engaged in business, who are engineering influence, we
are directly rewarded in relationship to the competency with which
.. . Wouldn't it be neat if doctors got paid that way? It's like you
had to pay them as long as you were healthy.
Now, what I want you to do, is to throw in a few of these
things. But primarily while all of this is going on, I want you to
focus on your breathing just like I've been doing here. So the
minute I smile, you have to smile and then when I nod, you have
to nod, don't you? So that, even though they know that you're in
120 PERSUASION ENGINEERING1
total control with their physiology it feels so good, they like it.
Now, an important part of this is that, while you are doing it, you
constantly, yourself, go into pleasant states. I'm thinking of all the
girls I dated when I was 20 years old. They were great, weren't
they? Now, as soon as you can get a non verbal response, it goes
pace pace lead. But while I am going through and I'm starting to
do things like listen to what predicates are used, whether he thinks
of pictures or words, it's this non verbal part that I want you to
concentrate on. Because as soon as you can control the tempo of
your voice so that it matches their breathing . . . Somebody asked
me yesterday. They came up to me, and they said, I can't see
people's breathing. And I asked, "Where are you looking?" And
they said, "Well I'm looking at their mouth." And I said, "Well,
you can't see it there. It's not like it comes out colored, you know.
You have to look at the chest. And watch the breathing down
here." And if they don't, because some people just don't breath
much, then what you have to do is get them to breath a little more.
Until you juice them, they won't. So you begin to set the pace,
your language. Take a deep breath and they will, too.
Somebody said, "What does all this have to do with free will?"
And I said, "There isn't anything that is free, is there? Because
after all, you wouldn't want something second rate, would you?"
Isn't that a great question? You hate it when things break, don't
you? You'd rather feel good, wouldn't you?
Now this is what I want, I want it so that when you stop, they
stop to the point where you begin to feel that you can get non ver-
bal gestures, and this kind of stuff here. You know, smiles and
things. You can even throw in other stuff, you know. Start from
scratch, nobody knows (Richard scratches his nose). But they might
find it handy and uplifting. See there are whole levels at which
you can do this and the trick is that you are always going to want
MENTAL MAPPING 121
to weave these levels together. You're going to,want to put lan-
guage patterns in. I love it when they fight it, too. Remember the
rule of thumb: when in doubt, escalate. Savor the unexpected.
Why not be blatant about it? I believe that your unconscious can
do anything. I've said, "You know, if you make part of your life
more sumptuous, why wouldn't the rest of it get that way?"
I mean, think about it. If you could wait in line at the bank,
because these are the worst salespeople in the world, you know . . .
banks now have to sell. It's so funny. I love this. Banks have never
had to be nice to you and now, there are so many of them, they
actually are ordering, we just got paid three and a half million
dollars to go in and train, in just one county in California, people
who worked at this bank, how to go this far to be nice to the
customers. Just enough rapport skills, no matching predicates,
none of this. Just using good tonality and trying to speak at the
same rate as people. Right. And noticing whether or not they were
smiling. Because this raised the assets of this particular bank, by
one billion dollars in less than a year and that's all we taught them.
Well think of it. It's such a novel idea. Somebody is being nice
to you in the bank. Do they do that where you go? It's so you'll
come in to begin with and they'll take your money, but they are
real shits about giving it back. We have these ATM cards, right? I
have $20,000 in my account but they will only give me $300.
What the hell is that about, it's my money. They go, "Well, we are
just trying to protect you." And they go, "Why would you want
more cash than that after dark? Just what do you plan to do?" "I
plan to buy a car and a plane ticket and a house and I want to pay
cash for it, it should be my right. We are supposed to live in free
societies, but thanks for telling us how to bank." "I'm sorry, you'll
have to line up over here." I don't think so. You know, I see those
lines, and something inside of me goes "fiott
122 PERSUASION ENGINEERING'
fiott," it goes, "Wait a minute, this is my money, I don't have to
wait in line. Just because they've put a velvet rope up doesn't mean
I have to go Mooo, Mooooo." Because it's always a good chance
they've made these places like churches for a reason, so that when
you walk in they make you feel small and helpless and be on your
best behavior one day a week.
Okay what I want you to do is I want you to do this with some-
one else and have somebody else observe to find out if the person
is doing this right and then make a few suggestions, kind of
change each other a little bit. Take the time to see if you can kind
of polish yourselves up a little bit. Take about just five, ten min-
utes and do it. Go for it.
By the way, when you are selling things. Age regression is
very powerful, and not in techniques. You always want to induce
that part of people that's a wanting consumer, known as a teenager.
Somebody was just telling me recently about the methods that
their son uses to get them to buy Nintendo, and Sega games and to
rent them, because it saves them money, because they don't have
to buy them. I think that's one of the interesting things, that, what
people won't buy for themselves, they'll buy for other people.
There are many people inside of their strategies, that if it's just for
them, that's when you say, well, I actually heard somebody in
here, I like this one. This is a great line, it goes, "But don't you
want a diamond?" It's, "Wouldn't you like to have a diamond? It
would be such a shame that you had to wait until you were so old
you couldn't appreciate it." Yes, write that one down. I spend a lot
of time in jewelry stores and those of you who have seen my wife
know why. My wife owns a jewelry company. I figured, "What the
hell, we might as well." We had enough stock. And she deals in
rare gems and antique jewelry and stuff and so, she buys it, I sell
it. And I found that it's so easy to prospect in that business, all you
have to do is go to the opera. It's great. You go
MENTAL MAPPING 123
down to the opera house, it doesn't matter what's going on. I found
that, with any product, the best place is to go where they use it. If
you sell coffee machines, I'd be standing outside of Kinko's all day
long. The idea that there are some people that think they are glued
to where they were. And it's not the case. Now somebody asked
me, "What about this limited channel communication stuff?"
Okay, how do you hear, how do you know because see, if you are
on the telephone, how do you know what somebody's breathing is?
It's actually the easiest, you can hear them. If you can't hear people
breath on the phone get a better phone, or better ears. One or the
other. Because when you are talking to people on the phone, you
can hear them breath. And also, when they are talking to you, you
can find out how long it is, between each breath.
Now, as I listen to people, as I walk through the training room,
I notice that some of you used the coffee technique, to control your
tempo. It's not a good idea. If you crank yourself with the coffee
and use that as the basis of what the tempo of how you think it's
going to be, it just doesn't work out quite as well that way, because
your staccato rhythm, 'uh uh uh uh uh', has a tendency to irritate
people, especially over the phone. But anyway, in general, you
want to be able to take your intonation and realize people process
language by the phrase so the reasons they put comma's, colon's
and periods in language is so that you will stop, and put a space in
between.
Now if you add to that fact, that in English, if you change your
intonation and flex it to go up, across or down it changes the word
you say. (See Figure 2) So that, if you say in English, when you go
intonation up, "Ma?" it's a question; then you go intonation flat
across, "Ma" it's a statement; and intonation down, "Ma!" it's a
command. In Vietnamese, those are three different words, so we
have it made. In Vietnamese, in order to make something a com-
124 ----- - PERSUASION ENGINEERING'
Figure 2
INTONATION
SENTENCE QUESTIONS
SENTENCE STATEMENT SENTENCE
MENTAL MAPPING 125
mand, Vietnamese salesman are going to have, a lot of trouble
compared to us.
Go through a list of all the bad stuff and you want to make
sure that you inoculate people against it, not induce it. Here's a
great line, "Well I know that you may feel that this is too expen-
sive." "What?" "It's only money. Think about it, it's only made out
of paper, it's just your hard work flattened out right into a little
thing so that you can open it back up into a world of opportunity.
Now if you skip all those opportunities and wait until you're old,
you might die and miss them all. It happens. I know people that
lived until they were going to retire and when they retired they just
ended up leaving their money to ungrateful children. Got
teenagers?" That's the first question I ask people, "You got
teenagers?" Cause I know where they live now. I go, "Spend it
before they do." I go, "Just buy everything you can, before it's too
late," because otherwise . . . you know what happens.
My daughter is in college and I went to college then and it
wasn't that expensive, now, it's unbelievable what they sock it to
you for, boy. Not only that but once you pay for the tuition, every
month they come by with some new bullshit thing and want
money from you. They don't now who they are dealing with here.
Hey, you know, I get this representative to get you on the phone,
right, it's cold calling stuff. This lady says, "Are you Elizabeth's
father?" And I said, "Yeah." "How much is this going to cost me?"
Go for the end. By the way, one of the things I found out studying,
that the relationship is, most of the great sales people constantly
test for close. Because a lot of times when you are done, if you go
too far you can unsell things. It's very very important.
I love this one guy because he was the king of this. His abil-
ity to go through and test for close constantly, because you know
you can do this with an embedded question, you go, "I don't know
whether you're ready or not to put that ring on your finger and
126 PERSUASION ENGINEERING1
have it be there for the rest of your life." And then you can watch
them, because people will answer you nonverbally. When you say
I don't know whether or not, you're not asking. Sometimes they
will even answer verbally, they'll go, "Well, I just don't know."
And I go, "I know you feel like you don't deserve it, but isn't it the
truth that you worked so very hard in your life."
Now I also was listening not only to your tempo but your
tonality. And Canada's better than most places, just think you can
be in New Jersey. Or you can be in Texas, cause sometimes in
Texas it's kind of hard to get them to understand you, you've got to
change that tonality. And I teach it down in Texas and I tell them,
"Well you all have got to understand that not everybody in the
world is from Texas, when you have people who aren't from
Texas," and they always go, "foreigners?" And I go, "Yeah, for-
eigners, like people from Alabama. You know, people from
Chicago," that there are so many varied tonalities, like I even
noticed in Canada, there is quite a variation of intonation patterns.
You'll like this one, The first time I went to Canada, to work, I was
hired to go to Vancouver to do a hypnosis workshop at a hospital.
And they let all of the British doctors sit in the front, and the other
doctors had to sit behind them. And the nurses had to sit in the
back. And I asked, "Why, do the Brits have problems?" Put an end
to that, didn't it? I said, "Oh, is it some kind of emotional thing? I
mean are they learning disabled, I mean what's the story here, or
are they just more stupid than the rest of the people?" You see
there is always a way with your tonality to frame any event or any
thing.
Now I asked you to write out a list of objections because we
want to take the very things that have gotten in your way all along,
because this is where the money is. If any of those things stop you,
than you need to know how to turn them around before they occur.
MENTAL MAPPING 127
The biggest mistake that people make is that they know an
objection is coming and they don't get it ahead of time. I get this
especially with people who sell high ticket items. I worked for
Cesna Jet for awhile, training them. By the way, the commission
on a Cesna Jet is great. You only have to sell one and you don't
have to work for three years. Now that's cool. It's selling that one
jet that's tough. You know, and I like that, out of the sales people
they had there. They had one guy sell 75% of the jets. And the rest
of them sold one when people forced them to do it. That's what it
was like. They were so horrible, it was unbelievable. You know,
people don't walk in and go, "Can I have the $5 million jet over
there and I'll take two of these." Unless they were an Arab at the
time. Some of those guys, they'll buy stuff even if they can't use it.
They didn't know what to do. That's the trouble when you take all
the money in a country and give it to twelve people. The economy
doesn't rock and roll.
It's like, I don't know about you, I'm still sitting around going,
"What happened to that So-Damn-Insane guy?" I'm still a little
pissed about this whole thing. The guy steals a country. Like we're
not going to notice? And he goes, "Oh no, it wasn't a country, it
was actually a province of my country." So they go over and they
drop the bombs all over them, we're good at that, because the
bombs are smart now. Now, we can drop a bomb like in a window.
I think that's pretty cool, that changes everything, doesn't it? I just
love that Quadafi guy, "This is the line of death, don't cross it."
And then you see a guy at the video game set. "This is the bomb
that goes down the driveway," and they drop it right in his front
window. And you can hear the pilots up there in the planes sixteen
miles away telling him which window it is. And he goes, "No, no,
no, the window more to the left, more to the left, yeah right up
there, okay that's right. A little bit up . . . up . . . there you go."
Bpppp right in the window. Now here's a sales
128 PERSUASION ENGINEERING1
technique. Change your behavior or we'll throw a bomb in your
window!
People can get away with this sort of nonsense, and you should
be able to think that there is a wider range of availability to you,
than the kinds of things that you have been doing so far.
Now, I know some of you, on the inside, get this feeling that
gets in the way. It's like, I don't know what it is, but when you
were young, you were programmed so much, that something hap-
pens in your stomach, right? And this is because you have not
really learned to have fun, yet.
So I want to use another technique, because remember, to me,
it's always learn to increase your skill and back up and increase
your personal power. Now, I want to blow out some of this
garbage that gets in your way, so that you can recalibrate to find
out what you really should be able to do. Because some of you are
just too straight, let's face it. The question is: do you want the
money or do you want to keep that cramp in your gut? Because
you say to yourself, "vavalaflavada," you get those voices in your
head that say, "You better not. You're not going to get away with
it." Tell them to shut up. We need to be able to put something
inside of you that makes it so that when you go and look at where
your limitations are, that you have a device, an automatic device
inside your mind, begin to flatten it out. Because, let me tell you
how that stuff works. It works exactly the same way a phobia
works. Isn't that what it is? You get phobic and you don't do things
that would work, therefore you make yourself poor. Isn't that neat?
And they'll go, "That's because I am mature." No, it's poor, not
mature. See, there is some cool stuff you can do, if you can begin
to really open up your ears because while you are talking to
yourself, you're not listening. I know this from the way some
people carry out the exercises when I give them. Some of you
aren't even close. There was a guy in one seminar just yes-
MENTAL MAPPING 129
terday who came in and said, "Well, I'm not allowed to talk, when
I move this picture over." And I said, "I never said that." And he
said, "Oh, well you know," he said, "We talked about it," and I
said, "Uh oh. You guys make it too hard." It's all much easier if
you keep your eyes and ears open. And people will point stuff out
to you in ways that you wouldn't believe.
When you're finished here, you are going to have a laugh.
People do stuff and they point things out, literally. They actually
do and they show you, especially if you don't come up and ask if I
can help you. Come up with a better line than that one. I usually
ask them how they are going to pay. You know I walk up and I go,
"Do you have a Mastercard?" And they go, "What?" And I go,
"Let me see, do you have a Mastercard, Visa, American Express or
are you going to pay cash?" And they'll look at me and they will
go, "For what?" And I'll go, "For the opportunity of a lifetime."
Would you want to miss the opportunity of a lifetime? Well, do
you?"
When I started doing this, I used to actually sell them shit they
didn't need. I'd just go in my closet and go, "mmmmmmmmm-
mm." Yeah I sold one person my son. He brought him back; he
learned the same thing I did. That kid's expensive. Not only that,
he eats noisy. I thought I was noisy. And you can't wake him up
once he goes to sleep. Something about kids, they grow up over a
recording studio, not alarms nothing. Nothing wakes these kids, its
unbelievable. They tried everything, like when they were in high
school, they'd stack like four and five alarm clocks up. And in the
morning I'd hear "Bring, bong, bring, bong," all this noise. And I
would be like three flights up. And I'd come down and I'd go in
there and these things are going off and they are sleeping away.
Can't wake them. And anywhere my son goes, the room turns into
a mess. He doesn't have to do anything, he just sits on the couch
and the stuff in the room moves.
130 PERSUASION ENGINEERING'
Now, what I want you to do is I want you to sit back and I
want you to close your eyes in just a minute and I want you to pick
something that you know you should've done and you couldn't. I
want you to locate that knot in your gut that gets in your way. Go
back to a time and a place where you thought there was something
you should've said, something you should've done. Or just thought
of doing something crazy. Because if you can begin to break out of
this rut . . . a lot of this is just because you were programmed in
school and you were programmed by your parents and all that
"you'll be embarrassed" stuff.
Localize where the voice in your head comes from. Let it keep
going and turn the volume up. Make that knot tight. Because you
should do it really well for the last time. Enough is enough. And
then what I want you to do is, instead of visualizing what did hap-
pen from the point you are where you get the knot big and tight, to
begin to run the memory backwards. I want you to be able to hear
the voice in your head rewind like a tape recorder. I want you to
walk backwards, talk backwards and have everything rewind just
like a movie moving backwards in a camera. Move way back
before the events started. Then I want you to add another voice
inside your mind. I want you to have one that goes, "Oooooooo,
cool." And I want you to feel something swelling up in the insides
of your legs. And I don't care if you are a man or woman, it's
purely an attitude adjustment. And I want you to say inside your
head as you look at this person, "Your ass is mine."
And I want you to feel something, a pull, because if you
rewind things you get to do them in a new way. I want you to hear
yourself start to laugh inside your head. You feel tingling spread
all over your body. I want you to feel the compulsion to do
whatever it is and then let the movie run forward. Feel yourself
walking through it, talking through it, listen to yourself. Let your
unconscious learn because what you've just been doing is a tech-
MENTAL MAPPING 131
nique that tells your mind, "Not this, this." First you rewind what
you don't want, let it fade away. Then you set your mind in the
right direction, and as it moves forward never make the sound "uh
uh," always make the sound "Yummm, ahhhh," and let your mind
roll forward and begin to run scenarios. Try it one way in your
mind, try it another. Keep adjusting it.
Each time I want you to go back to the beginning and run
through it. I want you to feel giddier, and more tingling until you
begin to see and hear what it is that you can do, that would work
for you. Run these things in your mind, over and over and trying
different variations, adjusting your tonality, adjusting your tempo.
Slow down the rate of your speech. Try speeding it up. Adjust the
scenario in your mind, move closer and closer to the target you're
after.
Your voice tone, your voice tempo, your physical movements
all affect your behavior and attitude. You need one really good
outlandish one. Even if it's something you really wouldn't do
because it wouldn't work for you. But run a scenario that's just
wild. Amuse yourself. Every once in awhile, they turn out not to
be so wild. Think of the things that I did that worked. I never
thought that people would respond well, but I went ahead and did
it anyway to find out. Now, they go, "Thank you, Bob, for selling
me a car."
Certainly, you can expand the range of what it is that you are
willing to consider. It's always a major surprise, how flexible you
can be. If you adjust and put a smile on the face of the people that
come around and if you make them feel good, make them feel
comfort, and make them laugh, they will always want to come
back and they will always want to bring people back with them.
They will always want to bring people to try new things and to do
it in new ways.
Now I want you to run this scenario and then another one and
132 PERSUASION ENGINEERING1
another one and another one. Let yourself just relax, take a deep
breath and let your unconscious maybe show you a few variations
that you want to try. Do this until you can make yourself laugh.
Because if you make yourself feel good, then the better you feel
with each new thing that you try in your mind . . . you're going to
teach your unconscious that it's time to try more new things, to do
things in new ways and you will have an outrageous attitude, have
most "grandes huevos." Because it is throughout the adjustment of
beginning to have a bolder and a bolder attitude, that you are
going to begin to make more and more money. And using that
imagination of yours, to begin to come up with a hundred, a thou-
sand different things you can try. But even in the scenarios inside
your mind it is important to listen to your voice tempo. Listen to
how resonant your voice sounds, change it so it sounds more and
more resonant.
If you do telephone work, I want you to pick up a phone, feel
it, hit that receiver and when you speak change your voice so that
the tempo is more discrete, put spaces between each and every
word. Remember, if you hear them breath you have the opportu-
nity to speak at the rate they are breathing. Remember, you can
use all downward, reflections. And this opens up the command
module in the mind. Because downwards inflection is the very
thing that gets the mind to know that any spoken utterance what-
soever is a command, not a question. You don't want to use a lot
of questions. You want to use embedded commands. And I don't
know whether or not you know exactly what an embedded com-
mand is. But you can stop and say to yourself, "I don't realize just
what it could be," but possibly you are learning. You are learning
at the unconscious level, and the conscious level, as well, because
they need to work together, in a way where it does new things.
What I'd like you to do now is, I'd like you to run a few sce-
narios in your mind and when you feel you're getting your brain
MENTAL MAPPING 133
headed in the right direction, and you notice that, when you con-
sider these things in your mind, you don't get a knot, because you
don't not need that. . . never. And before you try and stop yourself
from preventing the fact that it's not really necessary to do such
nonsense, you can remember a time when you did something and
you just had to laugh because the only reason you got knots like
that, is cause you are nuts in the head. Because you learned to do it
and if you can learn to do anything that stupid you can learn to do
something new. After all, it's the difference between furniture and
human beings.
Now if you don't think you can learn to do something new,
then become a couch. And remember I have a black belt in gestalt
therapy. Keep it in mind.
Now I want to add the following elements to what you did
before. I want you to change your tonality. I want you to slow
down. Hear your tempo. When you speak to somebody, if you
really want to impact them . . . if I talk really fast and I start talk-
ing about my product and making pictures in my head and talking
to myself, you lose total contact. Remember, most of the time, you
tell people nine times more than you need to. The trick is to
remember this rule of thumb. My sales training program goes like
this: Induce wanton buying state, then point to product. So if you
haven't got the state, you're not ready.
And there's no hurry to get there, but when you ask people
questions, I ask them embedded questions and I get my answers
non verbally most of the time, which is good enough for me.
When they walk in, they walk up and you ask them how ready are
they. I don't ask them "Can I help you?" Give me a break, espe-
cially if you are calling on the phone.
Somebody talked about how they sell a service, an advertising
service and then they have to go and renew it. Sometimes it hasn't
worked that well. So they have to take over for somebody else
134 PERSUASION ENGINEERING'
and go in where the other person has sold them and it hasn't
worked so their question to me is, "What do you do?" And my
response was, "Tell them that's why you're there instead of the
other person. Because the company cares about them and wants to
get them somebody that will really get them the full impact of the
service that's working for so many other people."
Now, one of the most powerful words you can learn by the
way, "now." You don't even need context for it. When you stop it's
a uniquely individual word and it marks things off. It also sets up
the ability for you to begin to connect together things which aren't.
Now, when you begin you want to make sure that you are
inducing a very intensely pleasurable state. When you have some-
body there and you're talking about something, you're inducing
desire. Think about it passionately. I even use all those predicates
because I just find that they work very well.
I like to use words like sumptuous. When you show somebody
something, whether it's a car or a copy machine, use words like
sumptuous or sleek, glistening. I always tell people I go, "Glisten
up for a minute." Leave a pause for them to respond. When you
see you are getting a good response, stop for a second, let them
bathe in it. Especially when you are showing them good things,
even if it is a brochure and you hand it to them. Don't tell them
they can read it later. Read it to them. It age regresses them. Use
that kind of tonality that you would use with a kid just a little bit.
People like it. It makes them feel good. You do want to feel good
don't you?
Now you have to make your tonality this way. When you are
starting to think about things you're going, "Well, um, um, um, uh,
uh, ah, oh." I want you to listen on the outside and you want to
smooth it out.
This time, I want you to make sure you use all three major rep-
MENTAL MAPPING 135
resentational systems. Overlap from one to another. You say,
"Wow," you look down at that diamond ring, "You don't know,
yet, what it's going to feel like when it slides onto your finger."
The other thing is, when you use words, you squeeze the juice out
of them. Every single word has impact. Let it have it. When you
have a word like sleek, sound like it. Don't go "It's really sleek,
man." You know, you don't say to somebody, "This car has got a
really smooth ride." Go, ". . . smoooooth ride."
Now, you may not think you are doing this. But when you
come in and you go, "You can have a lot of conn' fi fidence in our
ser ser service to be one of the b b b best ..." Well, maybe it's not
that exaggerated, but I've got news for you. In a few cases it was
just like that. Remember, if you find yourself starting to be
nervous, you're not in a good state.
We notice that when we teach this, a lot of you do these exer-
cises during the exercise and then during the breaks, it seems that
it's not important or something. These things are in life. Do these
things all the time. It's like saying, "Well, I use my NLP in my
therapy with my clients, but I didn't know I was supposed to use it
on myself." That's one of the problems we don't need to solve. It's
like when people say, and I know you know some, "Well, gee, I
guess I forgot to use my NLP skills, huh?" Well maybe they
should wire in to forget to be ignorant of the fact that they need to
use their own brain all the time in ways that are prosperous,
healthy, satisfied, motivated, and all the other things they want to
be doing. It's like I tell people. They come and say that they want
to make more money, or they want to have more happiness, or
love, or whatever. That's not what all this is about. When you thrill
yourself and live your life excitingly moving in a forward
direction you'll find that other people will want to be around, give
you opportunities, pleasure, and all the other "things" you want.
Living is the experience of processing and NLP is the means for
136 PERSUASION ENGINEERING'
doing it, something which, if we had learned it more explicitly
earlier, we wouldn't have this book, or any other, for that matter.
NLP isn't a "thing" you use. It's a means for you to learn how to
run your own brain. Period. All the time, because if you run your
own brain all the time so that you get what you want out the life
you're living, you wouldn't have to solve so many problems. You'd
be able to create more opportunity than you could handle, then,
you'd have to give some away because there would so much more.
But then you'd have to find people who would want to take those
opportunities of a lifetime and then you'd be selling . . . and if you
don't do this everyday then you'll have get a different job. If you
don't go into those states, fire off those anchors, thrill yourself up,
when you first get up in the morning, then you'll have to figure out
how to make it through the day, instead of making it the best day
of your life each and every day. Wake up in the morning and go,
"Life is good. Life is wonderful. And today ... is the best day for
me to be living life to its fullest..."
Connect it all together, so that you can be in a good state and
talk at the same time. Either that or you'll learn one state. And it's
not that productive. So this time take a deep breath go inside,
crank yourself up and when you come out, use every word like it's
a diamond. Place them perfectly. Make sure you take every word
and squeeze everything you can get out of the intonation. When
you say, "It's a wonnnderfuul opportunity." It's really different
than "it's a wonderful opportunity."
"It's a ch ch ch chance of a life time." Don't sound like Porky
Pig, he never sold anything. Get in there. Really open your ears.
Remember, you don't have to touch your nose and your throat and
your chest, just feel yourself do that. Go into state and line it up.
Listen, make sure that you're bathing them in tonality. It's going to
make it so that they yield desire. Once you do that, start to crank it
up.
MENTAL MAPPING 137
Remember, you want to know where those pictures are. You
want to know, because every moment you want to make sure you
put your product in the right place. I saw someone putting it in the
place where the person was getting agitated. I don't know, it was
either that or they had bad breath or something. But in either case,
they were standing far too close. Get yourself a little distance,
stand to the side, until you know where things are and grab a hold
of them. Draw the picture where you want it to be. Remember, if
you draw the picture and you put in the representational system
visually, overlap to the auditory and get into those kinesthetics
because that's where the real buying decisions are made. If people
don't feel right they may do it but they will not be happy and most
of the time they will bring it back and you will spend a lot of time
screwing around with them. Make sure that when you close a sale
in such a way that when they do come back, they feel obligated to
bring you someone with them.
The sale isn't over until the customer comes back and brings
someone with them.
You know, I've had tons of people who came back and said,
"Hey, you got any of those Cadillac's left?" This is in the middle
of the oil crisis, when people couldn't give them away. I'd look in
the paper, there would be fifty of them and they would still be
there weeks later. And the reason is because they didn't know how
to induce the state where somebody put their priorities in the right
order. The right order is that safety is more important than saving
a few bucks. I mean, how many of you guys would drive around in
a car that you could get killed in to save ten dollars a week? Is that
it? How many of you like spending money, because you know
what a water pump for one of those little small things cost in the
middle of the oil crisis? A water pump was $300 bucks! Oh, you
mean parts are hard to come by? And by the way, have you ever
tried to work on a car where the engine is bigger than
138 PERSUASION ENGINEERING'
the hood? Even to take a spark plug out, you had to be a contor-
tionist. You had to be able to make your hands, your wrists and
your elbows bend in all directions. Plus you had to go out and buy
new tools because it was metric. I saved those people a lot of
money. Most of them probably still have the car. But they brought
people back, I even got calls after I moved.
I moved to San Francisco where I always lived. And I moved
to San Francisco because I discovered that I was not a country per-
son, by the way. Many people are country people but I went into
the country and simply began to organize it into the city. I got
generators and stuff. There was a big snow storm on the mountain
that I lived on. Huge snow storm, snow fell more than it had fallen
in twenty years. A million trees fell down, and knocked out all the
power ... for three weeks. And I still had television, a heated
swimming pool. And there was just one big building on the top of
the mountain that glowed, I had people march out in the snow and
ask if they could come in and get warm, and they'd come in and
my stereo was blaring away. I had a big gas stove. I had people
sleeping in my living room. And people would ask, "Where are
you getting the electricity?" And I said, "From the sun. Isn't that
where everybody gets it from?" And they said, "No, we get ours
from Pacific Gas and Electric company." And I said, "They charge
for theirs." And that so aggravates me. I like it where you get a
check from them every month. I don't know if they have it in other
parts of the world but in the US, if you can generate more
electricity than you use, the meter runs backwards and they have to
pay you. You put a wind mill on top of your house. And it
generates more electricity than you use. PG& E has to send you a
check every month. And they had to tell me that just one time.
That was all it took, hey that's the best sales of all. They have to
buy it whether they want it or not. That's like the book of the
month club. Same deal, right? And the thing is every
MENTAL MAPPING 139
month they sent me a check and I had more electricity than any-
body, I had wind power, sun power, I even had a fossil fuel plant
of my own. I'd burn up anything that I could find. Anything I
burned up, I made it so that it made the windmill go around. It's
like all these things, I had on top of the mountain and I had an
indoor tennis court. Because I don't like the sun.
You know there's a hole in the sky. Did you know that? Isn't
that something? There is a hole in the sky. And I've had people,
"Oh no, let's go lay out on the beach." That's why the aliens don't
land because they are convinced that we are not the intelligent life
form on this planet. We work for our pets, not only that but they
eat us. They do, you go out on the beach in Hawaii and there they
are on the beach cooking. They put oil on them and everything.
What would you think if your were coming down from the sky?
The easiest way to enter the earth's atmosphere is over Australia
because of the way the earth spins. So if you come down across
Australia, and then you come down and you go across Hawaii on
your way to California, you go across the Hawaiian Islands, they
are cooking people on every beach there. Then when you get to
California they are boiling them in their back yard. It's got to look
that way, that's why the aliens, they're not talking to us, unless
they are hungry. It's got to be that way. Your point of view will
always be your point of view.
Now, I'd like you to stop for a minute, and I want you to go
back and think about that reference client. I want you to go inside,
and find out if they are beginning to look more like a meal. I like
to cover mine with chocolate. I see chocolate dripping off of them.
It doesn't matter what angle their at. Like even people sitting in a
seminar where they always have to sit in the same seat. I always
loved that, because some people can only get knowledge in if they
are only sitting in one chair. Otherwise the knowledge just won't
go in. You think I'm kidding don't you? I'm not actu-
140 PERSUASION ENGINEERING'
ally. If you think about submodalities and where those little win-
dows are, that's why because people can't sit in a particular chair,
they have to go one back and one over. It's the angle of opportu-
nity.
Now, if you stop and you think about that client now, I want
you to think about doing something outrageous. We want you now
to combine all of the things that we've been putting together into a
package and begin to run scenarios in your mind. You see we want
to turn this around, so that when the client looks at you, they say
the magic phrase.
You see you have to have the look inside your eyes. Keep in
mind for a minute, have you ever been up close to an eagle. Do
you know that look that eagles, have in their eye? It's a look that
just unnerves you, where they don't blink. They look deep into
your soul. And you need to have a little bit of the look of the eye
of the eagle inside of you. You need to be able to make sure that
you have that look that won't miss anything because it's inside of
yourself. You begin to formulate a feeling based on it. To know
what it's like to look out and to make it so that when you look at
things, it almost burns the soul of the person that you are looking
at.
See, if you step inside an eagle and you begin to look down at
your client, it doesn't mean that you have to give up the feeling of
the big cat. Because what I want to form for you is a little bit of
what we call a "will of steel." If you take for yourself, that just at
this moment, begin to feel something very solid sliding down
inside of you. Something that will build utter and complete
determination. Because one of the things you need to have is
almost like a homing device, because if you let your eyes . . . feel
right from behind them . . . and then something . . . that piercing
comes from the back of your eyes and the front of your eye begin
to look out and look down at that client. From the inside of your
MENTAL MAPPING 141
body I want you to stretch out and feel your claws and then slowly
let something slide down the top of your head. All the way down
to your feet. Something solid, something determined, and
something that once its inside you, never gives up.
I found out people give far too easily. But if you feel that com-
ing down just let it slide down and go shhhhhpt, and feel it lock in.
Something that does not give up, something that can bend a little
bit, but always springs back. And something surrounded with your
sense of humor. Because I want you to keep in mind that, every
client that you have trouble with is your university. When I talked
earlier about how stupid I think it is that they don't give degrees in
salesmanship, they don't give degrees in Persuasion Engineering™
. . . but they give degrees in poetry, they give degrees in every
bizarre thing you can imagine. It's unbelievable to me, the things
that they think are important, the things they think are academic to
substance. Now, I guess that's why they call it an academic
education. Because its irrelevance is not always aimed at
accomplishing the things in life that I think are vital. But if you
begin to feel something swirl around and around that wheel of
steel and begin to build up inside of you, I want you to feel it so
that it spreads right down to your finger tips. It locks in behind
your jaw, and the voice in the back of your head can reverberate
and say, "Their ass is mine." Because that's the point at which they
will become the university of life.
When I see other people where I would know their techniques
they would become my university. They became the person who
would increase the range of my flexibility. That's where you get to
go, "Ahhhhh. This is a rare and unprecedented opportunity to do
something new." Because if you know that the things that you
have done thus far don't work, you need to be able to vary your
behavior.
Now, I'd like to go back to the example of when I was talking
142 PERSUASION ENGINEERING1
about the head hunter. We played the tape from this guy, who
spoke slower than was humanly possible. Now, the guy that was
trying to get this guy to change his position, told me he couldn't
even get an appointment with this guy. So what he did was he
played the tape, and I walked up and I handed him a towel. And I
said, "You must match this guy's tonality, and tempo. You can't
speak faster than he has." The guy looked at me with fear in his
eyes and he said, "I don't think I can talk that slow." And I said,
"Fake it." I pressed the redial button on the phone and began to
dial, it rang, the guy picked it up and said, " Hello" and the guy
that I was doing the training with went, "Helllooo, Bob," and
began to strain In fact, I had to pass towels out to everyone in the
room because they were laughing so hard, tears were coming out
of their eyes. But within a matter of minutes, suddenly, this guy
had an appointment. This guy could only process information at
the rate that he could speak it. Now, you've started doing things
that had to do with ambiguities, you've learned that "I shot an ele-
phant in my pajamas," has more than one meaning. That as you
begin to realize that you can deliver simultaneous messages, that
when you can say to people things in a variety of ways and the
impact that it could actually have double meanings . . . And a little
fairy tale called the Adventures of Anybody, is a fairy tale in
which there is a whole chapter that runs where it could be two
stories. And it is the output of learning to master language. He
talks about how Anybody walked in a room and fell into what he
did not know. That's a pretty broad ambiguity. He then fell all to
pieces. He looked. He was ahead of himself. And suddenly there
he was, beside himself with fright. You know your ability to master
language and use it, to use what is called the Milton Model . . .
every single language distinction, begins to add to you a whole
new domain. We talked about embedded questions and I don't
know if you realize how important they can be. I don't know if
MENTAL MAPPING 143
you understood that that was an embedded question. Just like this
is. Embedded questions are very powerful, because what they do is
they elicit responses without verbal answers. Because one of the
things you always want to do is to build up response potential. It's
almost like building a dam in the Cyber River inside of a human
being, so that it builds up, so that when you open the gate, it flows
out with force. Now, I don't know whether or not you realize just
how important this can be. But I know that you're beginning to
understand. Really understand it. Because when you understand,
you will realize that it's not just that you can build it up with
embedded questions, isn't it? It's that you can use tag questions,
can't you? to do the same thing.
Now Gregory Bateson, who actually asked me to write Patterns
and went around with Milton, when I read it to him, actually I
gave him the manuscript and he read the book, he told me,
"Richard, this is shoddy epistemology." And I said, "What do you
mean, Gregory?" And he said, "You can't use a pattern to teach a
pattern." And I said, "You can't, can't you?" And he said, "If you
do, it violates logical levels." And I said, "That's all right, I don't
give a shit." What I care about is that the human ear begins to
develop recognition, because performance and production of
human beings aren't the same things. Human beings first learn to
hear. Then they learn to say. Human beings can hear when they are
children, and understand much more than they can produce in
language. Now that mechanism is alive and well inside of each of
you, is it not? As you begin to change what it is that you are capa-
ble of hearing, and let that wheel of steel begin to grow and hear it
come all the way and lock in outside yourself. You begin to find
that you can become more and more and more aware of what there
is to hear. You see most people think words just shoot across the
room and bound into someone's ear. It's not just that, you also have
the ability to bathe someone in tonality simultaneously. You
144 PERSUASION ENGINEERING
want the tonality that you use to be capable of creating both the
phenomenon where they are attracted to it and the phenomenon
where they are repulsed away from it. Where people say, "Well, I
have to go and look at every single kind of car." You always want
to go, "eeeewww," Because that sound which builds aversion, try
saying it and go, "eeeewww." I also find that that this (yachk) is
very useful as well. I always go, "You know it's not that important
that you look at every car, isn't it? It's just not that important." And
as you begin to use language to build responses with people, and
they go, "Well, I was going to look at the Volvo, the Jaguar and the
Mercedes." And I go, "Oh, the Jaguar. That's not very a good car,
you know what I mean?" You'll begin to build aversions at what it
is that constitutes your competition.
I always know that when I owned a restaurant, people would
come in and think it was the one across the street. And I'd go,
"eeewww, but they have a salad bar in that place." People go,
"Yeah," and I go, "Eeeeewww, do you know what's in salad bars?
People come by and blow germs in it, touch it with their hands,
and then you put that stuff in your mouth? Oh yuk! It's not exactly
the best thing." You'd be surprised you can build a phobia in an
instant. There's not only their germs but there're cooties as well.
And you have to be careful of cooties at all times.
You see, when I took people out and I showed them a used car
and I walked by and I went, "This is Ralph, this is Peter," Ralph
didn't actually run. Ralph was a Volvo. And I kept the Volvo
around because when I'd tell people, I'd say, "I'd like to show you,
if you are going to go buy a Volvo where you are going to be."
And I take them out into the back and I'd actually concocted
something in my laboratory, it smelled so bad, you couldn't
believe it. It was something really foul. It's not like a new car spray
smell. Quite the opposite. Such, that when they opened the door,
that smell would shoot through their body and build an aver-
MENTAL MAPPING 145
sion. And I would always simultaneously say, the word "Volvo."
I'm sure the Volvo people are going to love me, when this comes
out, don't you think? But it's not the new Volvo's, it's just the old
ones. Before Volvo was sold to another company they became the
lemon kings of cars.
Now, when I did this to build aversion, I did it because I knew
that when I showed people these things, that I would be able to
install in them a response that would aim them to the right direc-
tion, away from my competition and towards me. It's important
that you build a propulsion machine. Propulsion machines are
those things that push and pull at the same time. Now I want to
build a propulsion machine inside of you and the propulsion
machine I want to make . . . something that you know how to
install at all times . . . and that's one that moves to success. See if
right now, inside your mind, you begin to feel it start to rain
money, because you hear a funny noise, you begin to look around
in your mind and you notice $100 bills are raining out of the sky.
And you look over and you realize that you can pick up as many of
those as you want when you finish with that client over there. So
in your mind look at them and start to move towards them and see
the fear in their face. See the money, falling faster, harder,
building up around you actually having to trudge through it. Pick
up one of the bills and smell that new money smell. It's so dis-
tinctive, there's nothing like the smell of freshly printed money.
And begin to stick in your pocket. Because the closer that you get
to that client. The more of this you are going to get. Because if you
walk over and walk behind that client, put your hand on their
shoulder and say to yourself, "Ha ha ha ha, their ass is mine." You
will begin to adjust your attitude in a direction that moves towards
success.
Now, if you look back at how you were before, look back
across the ravine and see yourself actually being afraid of this
146 PERSUASION ENGINEERING'
client and laugh and realize how easy it is to change, and say to
yourself, maybe I'll go back and be the person that I was yester-
day. You know you can, you can leave this here, and forget every-
thing that you knew. And for each step you start to take back-
wards, I want you to feel a hot poke in the ass. Because that would
be just what it would be like to begin to step backwards, into the
inflexibility you had towards just this client.
See they constitute an opportunity, because once you conquer
them, you conquer a whole world of new clients. You increase
your close ratio, you end up having new flex ability. Because usu-
ally, there's not just one that's like them. There's a whole bunch
that are just like them. Those are the ones that you have trouble
dealing with. They may not be the ones that somebody else does,
but all the ones that you are successful with, they are a piece of
cake. It's all the ones that you haven't been able to connect with,
yet, because you haven't learned to vary your tonality, your tempo,
your behavior, even just the polarity responders, the ones that no
matter what you say, say "Yes" they say "no," say "no," they say
"yes," but, some of those are tough for people. Not for me, I go,
"You can't buy this car." And they go, "Yes, but I want it." You
see, you can turn anything around.
* CHAPTER SIX:
HOLOGRAPHIC DYNAMICS
You see, after you've got their attention and establish rapport
and gather information, you have to be able to put their presenta-
tion together in your mind. Now I like to do this as we go because
it's so easy and I do like to take the easiest way to do things, as
long as it works well.
See, when you build your presentation of propulsion, includ-
ing those things they want, need, like to have, the tonality that
goes with these, the direction to go buy and the roadmap to suc-
cess, you collect the information first, by asking questions that get
the information, then being sure that you have a way of encoding
it to remember it yourself. I do this by building a map, seeing
what they're seeing and saying what they're saying, and doing
what they're doing, and testing these enough to know that I've got
it. And the better you get, the more you get and the easier it is so
start now. Remember, it often doesn't take very much to move it
along but you have to do it.
It's like let's take the real estate business, for example. I just
had a friend of mine today call me and I asked how well he's
doing and he said, "I'm great!", even though the market is slow.
There are still people buying, they're just being more thoughtful
before making their decisions. So he tells me how easy it is for
him and I asked him, of course, how he's doing it. He'says, "I give
148 PERSUASION ENGINEERING
them what they want in a way that lights them up vivaciously."
So, here we are in a selling situation where we want to demon-
strate just one simple example about how to engineer influence
purposefully and quickly.
The salesperson, Charlie (all names have been changed to pro-
tect the engineers and engineered), has his desk right in front of
the the office by a window, where he can see out front when peo-
ple drive up in their cars. All this information for free, you don't
even have to ask for it, just to get started.
This couple drives up, gets out of their car, and looks around.
The woman points to one of the homes across the street and he
looks. They say something to each other (this is where lip reading
comes in handy). They walk across the street and look at the house
from different angles, she's nodding up and down and he's moving
his head side to side across his shoulders slightly. They turn, begin
to cross the street and they both stop and look at the house next
door. Then they go over there. Charlie, by the way, goes into the
next room where he can more easily observe them. They walk
around the house and when they come back to where they started
they're both smiling, almost laughing, there's Charlie starting to go
outside, when they come in.
Charlie greets them with, "You really like the one next door,
huh?"
Charlie has their attention and wants to keep them in what he
considers to be an already existing good state.
He: "Yeah, we've kinda been looking around, you know, and
we saw your company here so we thought we'd stop and look
here."
Charlie starts matching the pace of the customer's breathing
and rhythm. He also notes that his question isn't answered directly
but they're both smiling again like when they were next door.
HOLOGRAPHIC DYNAMICS 149
C: "Well, I'm wondering, exactly what will do it for you
today."
Uses an embedded question and lays out a time frame.
He: "We really have to find a new home soon. Our lease is up
and we don't want to get stuck extending it. We're ready for this
and want to make the best of our investment."
Note the "have to" operator and "don't want" which Charlie
can use to build the propulsion later. Also note the "want" to and
what follows it, i.e. investment. There's also a signal to timing:
"ready."
C: "So how can I make the best of your investment work for
you? What does your new home here have to have?"
Charlie paces and then uses the "have to" operator to to elicit
more information connected to this.
He: "Well, as we look down the road, we want to be sure we
have something with resale value. We also may plan on just stay-
ing here when we raise our own family so ... we need at least three
bedrooms, maybe four, we need two full baths, we want a large
living room, an eat-in kitchen and a basement. We would also like
to have a fireplace and a patio would also be nice."
Notice the reference here to timeline and direction and the
modal operator of possibility "may". Then he starts his modal oper-
ators linked to the specific criteria content: need, then want, then
like-to-have. Charlie carefully maps these out according to how the
customer maps them out with his analog movements linked to each
of these. (See Figure 3)
She: "And we also need a laundry room and need lots of closet
space. We don't want to be cramped in anymore."
Note here the addition to the "need" modal operator linked to
more specified criteria content. Charlie also notes this customer's
analog information that is linked. He also notes that the guy nods
his head here in agreement with her. Also the "don't want" will
150 PERSUASION ENGINEERING
Figure 3
HOLOGRAPHIC DYNAMICS 151
become important for building the propulsion later.
C: "Let me see if I got this right. You need three bedrooms,
maybe four and you need two full baths. You also need a laundry
room and lots of closet space. You want a large living room, an
eat-in kitchen and a basement. And you'd like to have a fireplace
and a patio."
Now Charlie gives back the modal operators linked to the spec-
ified criteria, including the analogs exactly as they were presented
to him (mirrored to the same exact place for them) and even nods
his head back to the guy when presenting her information back to
her.
Both: "Yup"
(Yes Response!)
C: "And as you look down the road, this will have a good
resale value and been a good investment, even if you plan to stay
here and raise your family?"
Charlie starts to link these into the timeline as described by
them.
Both: "Yup."
(Another Yes Response!)
She: "Ohhhh, and we really love those cathedral ceilings, if
you have them."
Charlie notes the short breathing in and the tonality that goes
with the smile and obvious skin color deepening as she adds this
criteria. She also points both her arms up toward the ceiling in con-
nection with this.
C: "Ohhhh, great, you'll love the ones we have here."
And he matches it back exactly, except for raising his arms
toward the ceiling (And I'm wondering why not)
Both: "Can we take a look at the house now?"
Charlie notes their speech change to a more rapid rate with
increased volume in their voice.
152 PERSUASION ENGINEERING
C: "Ohhhh, of course, you're going to love this one, let's go by
the house right now ..."
Charlie uses the same match as the previous one and this time
as he says "let's go by (great phonological ambiguity, buy the way)
the house right now, he matches back her analogs to the cathedral
ceiling.
Now, as these two people light up, by the way, this is great.
I've seen this guy in action before, but this gets better.
He's not satisfied with this alone because he's had many cus-
tomers who have changed their minds once they get back to their
friends and families, or whatever, so he continues to elicit more
information from them. You see, we want to begin to connect as
much as we can to whatever feeling it is that will override any-
thing else. This may also be very useful later, if we need it to over-
ride any slight objections that Charlie may not have inoculated
against (this is a big ticket purchase).
So Charlie begins to ask questions around the already present-
ed information so he can gather even more. Now, this information
is valuable and Charlie knows that each and everytime he asks for
more and valuable information, he's going to have to keep track of
how much he gives back, in terms of information. The recip-
rocating effect of information exchange is important. I learned this
by watching and listening in on a few interactions where the
salespeople kept asking for information and didn't offer anything
back. It was like an interrogation or something. It's like, "So what
kind of house do you want? How many rooms? How much do you
want to spend? Do you want a corner lot? Do you have kids?
Where do you work?" and other things like this. I mean, after all,
the customer is doing more work then they have to. Some people
even go for very private information before they've earned the
right to it. Like that insurance guy earlier. He asks me for my
address, and remember, he's not going to send me any-
HOLOGRAPHIC DYNAMICS 153
thing, right? So why does he need my address. I give him my
standard mailing address, a post office box, and this guy goes,
well, what's your street address? This is like the second or third
question the guy asks me. And I say, "Well, I gave you the best
address to mail me information and he goes, "What, do you live in
a p.o. box?" and I say, "Yeah, and it's pretty roomy in here, too.
We're even thinking about adding an indoor pool." Of course, I'm
the one with the attitude, right?
So, Charlie starts asking about the "needs" first, right? Because
he knows that most probably, the "needs" must be filled. These
generally aren't negotiable, although we have seen that change
from time to time, depending on their orientation and the point of
time. So he says, "So you need at least three bedrooms." She says,
"Well, four would be better because, if we stay, we'll probably stay
for a while. And Greg and I need an extra room anyway for our
office." Charlie says, "Office?" (a great way to elicit more
information, by the way. Take the last word or phrase of their
sentence back as a question.)
She says, "Well yes, we've been operating our own small busi-
ness on the side, you know, to make some extra money to give us
a little flexibility in our investment for our future." Charlie goes,
"Gee, that must work out well for you." They respond, "Yeah. It's
pretty good. We don't want to keep doing the same old thing like
everybody else and we like our freedom, so we thought we'd take
a chance on this thing and so far it's worked out well for us. It
could even turn into a full time thing for both of us. That would
give us a lot of flexibility with our time and everything. We could
do more of what we want when we want."
Now inside this conversation is lots of information for Charlie
to map and use. (There's a diagram that attempts to illustrate this
and we acknowledge that it is a single dimension, single modality
illustration and rough at best, but we want to illustrate a way
154 PERSUASION ENGINEERING
to use this, as an example on paper. The best way, of course, is to
map it in your own brain, as you go along). (See Figure 4)
In short, Charlie asks questions in some general areas that are
obviously home buying oriented. He can choose from about nine
different general areas, and usually is guided first by the cus-
tomer's desire to go over those areas. Some of these areas may be
financial, timing, the home style, interior layout, the community,
the site itself, builder history, etc.
So, in your particular business, it would be most useful for you
to come up with some areas like these for your business. What
sorts of general information do your customers ask for? If you
don't have this right now, start keeping track of the questions you
are asked. Remember, everytime your customer asks a question,
it's the opportunity for you to build your presentation up front later
with the next customers, and begin to inoculate against objections.
Not that every question is an objection, we're not saying that.
We're saying that each and everytime your customer has a
question, it's because they may not have an answer from your
company, and they may already have someone else's answer and
are making a comparison. But let's simplify this. Questions are
good because they are an opportunity. If you get the same kinds of
questions again and again, it's an opportunity.
So, Charlie has these different general areas he can sort
through with the customer. We only ask a few types of questions
because we want some specific information. We want to know
where the majority of the information leads to, especially when it
comes to big ticket items. We get very lucky sometimes and it's
easy. Then, again, there are times when the customer, likes to have
more information than we think they need, but they feel they need
it, so we like to be in a position to target it in to where it's useful to
both them and us. You know, some people just like to collect
information without really using it. If you're going to have
Figure 4
156 PERSUASION ENGINEERING
it, use it, or you're wasting their time and yours.
We want to know where the different contexts come together,
or tie together so that later on, we can use that to light up all their
candles at once.
Here, think about it like this. How many doors do you want to
have to open to find out where the prize is? And how many of
those doors can lead to the right pathway for reaching the ultimate
destination? It's like how easily can you narrow down the window
of opportunity so that there is less "slop" and more precision in
your engineering influence? There are lots of different ways of
narrowing the windows of opportunity. What's important is that
you can use just language to narrow this window. It's also inter-
esting to note that the narrower the windows are that the client
already has, the more you'll have to work to find the existing win-
dow of opportunity. Pretty simple, though, when you watch and
listen.
Let's say we want to use the example of where somebody
comes in and they begin to present their own representation of
what they want, or expect to get from the sale. Based on what they
present, notice their physiology, how they stand, sit, head tilts, etc.
especially when they're using generalizations, nominal-izations,
and modal operators. There are, of course, other Meta Model
categories, and these are real easy to track. I mean, how they stack
these generalizations, and which Meta Programs they're using in
the sentence structures can give more information than most
people need, or know what to do with, for that matter.
The modal operators, provide a way of prioritizing, or ordering
the sequence of things, and if you want to notice how they place
along the timeline of the person, you start to notice how many
doors the information has to get through to reach them. It's always
amazed me that people present what's going on in their brain
through their language and how many people have missed
HOLOGRAPHIC DYNAMICS 157
it through the years. Ever heard someone say, "Am I getting
through to you?" The question I would ask is, "Getting through
what?" Well, maybe it's just that we need to know where the win-
dows of opportunity are open or how to open those windows of
opportunity.
So, Charlie asks questions about different contexts in his par-
ticular business, like the community, the timing, the finances, and
each time he goes into that area (of their brain and map) he asks,
or uses conversational postulates, or embedded questions as he
starts to sort for the opening where heaven waits. He may ask
things like, "So you need three bedrooms?" And they'll respond,
"Well, yeah, we have two kids and they each need their own bed-
room. Of, course, four bedrooms would be better, you know."
"Oh, of course." Then he'll ask, "And you want a good commu-
nity, of course." "Well, what we're really interested in is whether
or not there are things for the kids to do. You know, where are the
playgrounds, what kinds of sports are there, and those things?"
Charlie takes each of the areas he figures are going to be of
interest or objection, and begins eliciting the information he needs
to build his presentation.
* CHAPTER SEVEN:
OBJECTIONS
We want to spend some time working on turn arounds. These
turn arounds are where you view limitations. It's the very doorway
to success. So I want you to pull out that list of objections. And
we are going to do some serious ass kicking here. It's always
amazed me. Here was a Mercedes lot and these guys never left it.
In all the time they were there, they had no courage. They never
got in the car. The only time they would leave is if somebody was
nice enough to come in and go for a test drive. And then they'd
take a test drive and all they would do is drive around the block.
Not me, I'd like to put the top down, and drive up the beach, take
a nice long leisurely drive. I'd let them drive and I'd sit in the back
seat and go, "You want this, you want this." And they'd go, "I
know." And I'd go, "You want this so much."
I know that, think about it, inside of you, each one of you
thought of the thing that you absolutely saw and you absolutely
had to have it. There wasn't just a picture, there was a voice, too,
wasn't there? You remember? Now, where was the voice? Wasn't
it most of the time behind you? It seems to be very, very univer-
sal. So I like to get behind them and talk. I spend a moment or
two, especially if I can learn their intonation pattern. And some-
times it doesn't matter, because a lot of times it's not even their
voice. It's somebody telling them whether they can have some-
thing. Very often it's a parents voice or a grandparent's voice. It
160 PERSUASION ENGINEERING
doesn't matter, cause in the future it's going to be my voice. I make
sure of that. Now, I flat out ask them, I'll say, "Well when you
bought something and you knew it was perfect and you were right,
when you made your best decision, where's the voice come from?
Is it behind you, in front of you? to the right? to the left?" And
they'll stop and go, "I never thought about that." And they'll go,
"Well it's kind of back here," which it usually is.
And it has to do within our cultures. We spend so much time
on the phone. People go literally into telephone postures. Just like
they call up, "Hello, self, are you in there? I want to buy this car,
would that be all right? No, you can't buy the car. You must do
this, you must do that. Well yeah, but I really like the car." Now,
the next time you call yourself, tell yourself to shut up. And have
your own way.
But I like to get behind them, because you see there is very lit-
tle that I can do from the passenger seat, compared to what you
can do if you actually sit in the back seat right behind them. Now,
I do this with everything. I walk around behind people, because
when you sit them in a chair, I don't care if it's insurance, I've sold
just about everything there is. Sometimes, I've sold stuff at places I
don't even work. You know, I tried it. I had a guy leave his
insurance book one night, so I went up and down the street the
next day selling insurance, I found out that you can be arrested for
that. I said, "Well I didn't take any money." And they said, "Yes,
but you misrepresented yourself." I said, "No, I knocked on the
door and I said, "I'm not an insurance salesman, but I want to show
you something," and I took out the book. Actually I wrote the
names down and gave it down to the insurance guy and he went
back and still hooked up three of the sales. They already signed on
the bottom line. And he went back and he still talked them out of
it. That shows me something: Stop when your ahead.
Constantly you want to be able to take your presentation and
OBJECTIONS -------— ----------------------------------------------------161
put in it and ask questions, embedded questions which say things
like, "Well I don't know if you are ready to just take this home
with you." People nod yes, you get to shut up. Let them buy it if
they want to. Don't talk them out of it. Don't be mean, because a
lot of times, people were ready to buy something and I guarantee
you that you talked them out of it. Because you couldn't stop. "Oh,
but I'm only this far in the sales process." No, anytime you can
close, you're done.
You may want to install a few post hypnotic suggestions. I do.
I like to install the suggestion that they will come and they will
bring me twenty new people. Actually, once they sign the contract,
I pick it up and start to tear it, and I go, "You don't deserve this,"
and they will grab it out of my hand and they'll say, "Well wait a
minute. What's wrong?" And I go, "I don't know, Barbara is not
for you." I said, "Look, it's like this, I've managed to sell you
something that you really want, what are you going to do for me?"
And they go, "Well you work here." And I go, "Sometimes. That's
not the point. Don't you know people who deserve to have as good
of an opportunity as you do? Don't you care about the human
race?" Ruthless line, isn't it? But you have to master ruth-lessness.
Sometimes you just have to be cruel to be kind. And the more you
try to think that's true the more you will. Because it is in it's own
way, you see, if you believe in the way that you do things. And I
believe that people making the right decision and, having that
decision stick inside of them, is the most important things a human
being can learn about: your ability to engineer one decision so that
they make a good one is going to lead to a lifetime of their
engineering good decisions about lots of things. Because when
they understand that these are good decisions and these are bad
decisions, then they are going to start looking to find out whether
the decisions they are making in their life are good ones or are bad
ones. What I want you to learn is to start making
162--------------------------------------------------PERSUASION ENGINEERING
even better decisions because when you decide to treat somebody
you're working with one way, versus another, in essence what you
are doing is making a decision which cuts your income to what it
is now.
Your income should be twice, four times what it is now. But
you make decisions that make you behave in certain ways. That
make you sound certain ways. You walk up and you pitch too fast.
One of the worst things that most people do is pitch way too fast.
Make them feel real good and then bathe your product in it. Bathe
your service in it. They need to know that every time you come
near them . . . not that they're going to feel like they have their
hands down their pants . . . but they feel like they are stepping into
a warm bath and it's where they want to be. You want them calling
you constantly, finding out if they could spend more money, don't
you? How many of you would say, "No, I'm sorry, I won't sell you
another one.". That's what you are doing if when you're done, they
feel like they have been raped.
You see, you can force people into things, but you can't make
them get addicted to it. Now, the addiction pattern is something if
you want to make yourself the commodity. You want to make it so
that it is so much more fun to talk to you on the phone, that they'll
call up and buy-another one. Now, do you want to talk through
your nose anymore? Or do you want to begin to speak from down
here (diaphragm)? You want to begin to say hello in a way that
makes them go, "Yes!!" That same feeling inside of them, in fact,
you want to make it so they internally say yes so many times, don't
you, don't you, don't you?! So that inside that embedded question,
they go, "Yes, Yes I do." Do you want to feel good? "Yes." The
more yeses you can get inside of them the better they are going to
feel at every moment. Now, if you have lots of yeses you have the
command module open. Then you begin to put in suggestions as
any elegant hypnotist would do. And that's
1
OBJECTIONS 163
not the bozo guy walking across hot fire up there. Tony at least
changes your fears in you into something. Change your fears into
courage, but you know the other guy, there's another guy now, that
just does the fire walk, he doesn't bother with changing your fear
into courage. The question is, how many fire walks have you been
on? And I don't remember the guy's name, but he came up to me at
a thing I did in Denver. He walked up to me and looked me in the
eye and said, "I've done forty-five fire walks." And I said, "What's
the matter, haven't you gotten it right yet? Because his problem
was that he turned his fear into stupidity. The point is to overcome
it, not just keep doing it for no reason. Now we have a hypnotist,
that has someone walking across broken glass, there's a great
decision. Let's all throw bottles down and tap dance on it.
I'm looking for people that when they do something, they have
a feeling that stays with them for the rest of their life. When I take
somebody out, the best point in the sale of all to me is when
they've signed on the dotted line. Because I take them out and I
show it to them. And I go, "It's yours forever, no one can take this
away from you." And every single time you look at this, you're
going to feel good. You're going to know that you made the right
decision. You're going to think of this, because you like me, want
the best for yourself. You, like me, want the best for yourself and
others. So when you think of somebody who has needs, what's
going to come to mind? Richard is, except I want it to be you. I
don't want you to go out there, get them almost up to the close of
sale and then have them call me on the phone.
I have a thing that I do called the wealth concert, because I
really think that people need to be trained to appreciate wealth.
And most people, when they get it, it either makes them paranoid,
or they become stupid. I mean, they just don't know how to deal
with it, that they don't know how to bathe themselves in success,
164 PERSUASION ENGINEERING
or once they start to become successful, they cease working. They
don't realize that's the time to pour it on. You can actually get
ahead. On your shoulders too.
Now the thing about the wealth concert, that I like to do is, I
like to get people into the idea that what they are about to do is
going to change everything forever. It's the best decision you could
make. A decision to be successful. Let's see, when you make a
decision, when you look at your decision thing, it in essence works
the same way a post hypnotic suggestion works. How many of you
decide what to get at the store, write it down, don't bring the list
and get everything? I'm like that, I always forget the list, but never
anything on it. Some people just have to write things down to
remember them. Look around, see the people with the note pads,
they are not going to read these notes. It's just how they write in
their head. Some of you just write it down directly.
I've started doing it now, because I can't find a pen most of the
time. My dog takes them. She's got a whole collection under the
bed. I can't get under the bed, it's too small. So she has all my
things down there. She goes and holds them just out of reach. She
goes, "You, ha ha ha ha, you work for me." I also have bought one
of those beds that doesn't have wheels and is made out of very
heavy wood. I bought a mattress that's so heavy I can barely flip it
over. So to lift the bed up, I can lift it but I can't crawl under it at
the same time. But next time I get a bed, I want hydraulics so I can
press a button and it goes, nnnnnnnt. How many of you would like
to press a button and have your bed go up towards the ceiling so
that nobody could bother you? On the other hand, what some of
you need is a bed that's high like that and then tilts out in the
morning, when your alarm clock goes off.
And everybody always asks me, "How do you overcome objec-
tions?" And my answer is, "You don't." Not if you are good at this.
OBJECTIONS 165
If you know what the objections are going to be, you inoculate
them so they never occur.
I make that part of the presentation and people say, "Well they
always tell me it's too expensive," and so I'm bound in my pre-
sentation to talk about how "idiots think that the price of this, the
people who are totally idiotic think that this is too expensive . . .
but what they don't realize" and then you can bring up things.
For example, you know, how many cars do you want to buy in
the next ten years? How many vacuum cleaners do you want to
own? How many times do you want to buy a stereo? Or do you
want to buy something and be partially dissatisfied with it because
every time you use it, it breaks on you? Or do you want to do it
once and do it right? After all, you know, you get what you paid
for in the sense, not that you pay less money because in the long
run you can pay more money.
One of the things I've always thought is that I hate buying
junk. Because I end up buying it again. How many of you have
bought many of the same product because you never bought a
good one? Think about it. If you sell good products, you'll get
good results. If you are one of those people that sell junk, you'll
have to come up with another line. You'll have to come up with
hey, you know, its like making payments but getting a new one
every year. Think about it, you can have a new car every three
years or one car for ten years, all right, at the end of the ten years,
the good car will be worth something. The other ones, you'll have
had the satisfaction of knowing that there aren't cooties in your
car.
Cooties are a powerful part of sales. Do you have cooties in
your country? Do you know what those are? Ahhhhh, mmmm-
mmm, see this all started in elementary school. Don't you
166 PERSUASION ENGINEERING
remember that people of the opposite sex had cooties? Well, now
psychics have taught me that there are cooties, alright. And what
cooties are is that when you buy a used car it's got somebody else's
vibes on it. So the trick is not to not have vibes on it, it's to make
sure that when you sell them a used car, that it has good vibes on
it.
After all, if a creep drove the car, the good smell won't last
forever, but to sort through and pick out which of the cars your
going to sell then do what I do. What you do is you show them
two you know they won't want, the absolutely worst choices for
them so they are ready and frustrated and then say well there is
one other one, but I don't think you'll like it. And then put them in
something which is perfect and let them force you to sell it to
them. And fight them every inch of the way. They go "Oh no, no I
like this, this is perfect." "You don't have to say that just to make
me feel better." People, say, "Well, I would never do that." Like
they really would you know. And go, "Hey, I'm not that desperate,
you know. I could take you to another car lot. You know, you
could put up with their lying ways." I actually used to take my
clients, sometimes to other car lots, because if we didn't have
anything that I thought was right for them, I would go over and
negotiate for them with the other salesmen. They hated that.
Because I could get the price way down. In fact I could get them
down on their knees if I wanted to. They go, that's not fair, and I
go that's right, but all's fair in sales. Is it not now.
Again, it's important that you build a propulsion machine.
Propulsion machines are those things that push and pull at the
same time. (See Figure 5)
Now I want you to build a propulsion machine inside of you
and, I want you to make something that you know how to install at
all times. And that's one that moves to success. Right now,
Figure 5
168 PERSUASION ENGINEERING
inside your mind, begin to feel it start to rain money . . . because
you hear a funny noise, you begin to look around in your mind and
you notice $100 bills are raining out of the sky. And you look over
and you realize that you can pick up as many of those as you want
when you finish with that client over there. So in your mind look
at them and start to move towards them and see the fear in their
face. See the money, falling faster, harder, building up around you
actually having to trudge through it. Pick up one of the bills and
smell that new money smell. It's so distinctive, there's nothing like
the smell of freshly printed money. And begin to stick in your
pocket. Because the closer that you get to that client. The more of
this you are going to get. Because if you walk over and walk
behind that client, put your hand on their shoulder and say to
yourself, "Ha ha ha ha, their ass is mine." You will begin to adjust
your attitude in a direction that moves towards success.
Now I want you to do another exercise. I want you to go into a
group this time and I want you to make the same pitch, only this
time, I want you to make your voice as sumptuous as you possibly
can. I want you to stick in lots of ambiguities and I want you to
make your pitch to somebody else in the group. Just switch it
around a little bit. So that you're talking to another person. But yet,
the others will still have the ability, and I want the other two
people to stand behind you while you do, and to throw in sugges-
tions. Not too many. Say things like, "Slow down." Somebody else
can say, "Pace his breathing." Somebody else can throw out a nice
ambiguity so that you can hear new voices in the back of your
mind, telling you new things that you can try and do. When you
finish this book, I want people to go, "How was the Persuasion
Engineering™ book?" You can go, "It was better than sex."
Did you guys see that tv program where they have the hypno-
OBJECTIONS 169
sis show, and everybody that comes out they go, "It was better
than sex"? "How was it for you?" "It was better than sex." You see
I want you hypnotize them and go, "It will make you successful, I
will make four times the money in half the time and your orgasms
will last four times as long, and be four times as intense."
Oooooooo, you're getting it. I had somebody once who in their
head goes "How? But I can't do it."
Did I ever tell you the Gazelle story? There are two lionesses,
sitting out there and they are looking out and there is this pack of
gazelle's going by and the one lioness goes, "I'm hungry," fffffft,
runs up and grabs a gazelle and eats it. Great! Sits down next to
the other lioness and the gazelles go by again and the other lioness
goes, "Will you get me a gazelle?" And she goes, "Get your own
fuckin' gazelle." And she goes, "But they're so fast. And I hurt my
paw." And she goes, "Get your own fucking gazelle. And she
goes, "Well, but I have a cold." Two months later, two hunters go
out onto the tundra and they look and there is a dead lioness that
starved to death. Don't let it be you, go do the exercise. Make it
good, make it quick, and make it clean.
Now back to that list of objections I asked you to put together.
Now, there has been a traditional view inside of most sales pro-
grams, most persuasion programs, that the trick is to overcome
objections. And I've always found that to be kind of silly because
if you do anything for any length of time, it seems like you should
know what they're going to be ahead of time. And if you know
what they are going to be ahead of time you should be able to find
ways of inoculating so that you don't get them in the first place. If
you have to overcome the same objections over and over again,
that doesn't seem like planning to me. It's the same thing I find
when people deal with stress. People always tell me that they want
to reduce their stress, then I always tell them why have it in
170 PERSUASION ENGINEERING
the first place. It seems to me that if you plan on having stress, if
you have plan on having objections then you're a bad planner.
Through the years one of the things that I've noticed very quickly
is that there just aren't that many objections to anything. Now,
what I'd like to do is, I'd like to take a few moments and go over a
few that we've come across as some examples.
For example, people don't have enough time, (they are just
about to die. Is that what they mean by that?) Haven't got enough
time for health care? They don't have enough time to go to a chi-
ropractor's office? Wouldn't that be easy to turn around? I haven't
got enough time to go to the chiropractor's office (like I haven't
got enough time to be healthy). And you go, "I understand. So,
you'd rather be less efficient in everything that you do, by feeling
bad?"
Or, they equate the amount of money they spend with whether
or not they want healthcare. "That's good. Because after all who
would want their sex life to be better? That wouldn't be worth
anything, would it?"
If you wait until these things come around, people will bring
them up. But if you know ideas make it so that things are, because
"not everything is covered by your insurance. Not everything
works either. You see, most insurance is for when things go wrong
and you are in pain and get very sick. Do you know there are
people that aren't willing to spend money to have their life be
vibrant, they'd rather wait until they get sick. What idiots! Isn't that
the craziest thing you've ever heard of? Now what was it you were
going to say?"
Now, if you don't inoculate people against these things, they'll
actually bring them up and say them to you. But worse than that,
they will actually think them. The trick is, that if you know what
objections are going to come up, if you can pre-inoculate, if you
can take and put a frame around it and you can put a frame
OBJECTIONS 171
around anything. Look at the stuff that people are able to sell.
Listen to this: mobile homes. When you go on vacation a cou-
ple of weeks a year, why not bring everything you own with you.
It's the world's most expensive way to travel third class. Now I
know this because I always looked at people in these things and
thought, this is a really nutty thing. But I got this idea, it was last
year. I was doing a tour, and I was doing one in San Diego and
one in Los Angeles and I thought, "You always leave the dog at
home, why not rent a mobile home?" I don't know about you. You
probably drive back and forth to work too much, but I've put, in
the last four years, twelve thousand miles on my car, which means
I don't drive very much. I drive about three thousand miles a year
and that's about it. And when I drive, I drive in a very small place
where you go very very fast up and down. But I saw an ad on TV,
it just struck me, It was in the middle of the night, I was working
on something, this guy came on and said, "We will rent you any
mobile home." and for forty bucks a day. I thought, "Gee, that
sounds so cheap. Maybe, I'll just slowly drive down and then I'll
edge my way out. So I went over to this place and I rented this
gigantic thing."
It was called a "Bounder". Good name for it. I went back to
my house and loaded everything I own in it and proceeded to drive
to San Diego. Now if you've never driven anything that's the size
of a room, you shouldn't be allowed to. And that's all there is to it.
I must have given more people heart attacks than you can
imagine. Because the part I was in was very small. And I just
drove like that's all there was. I turned on the turn signal. But I
used the Chinese method. Because I learned to drive in San
Francisco, which is "turn on turn signal, count to three."
Now whether it's chiropractics and chiropractic medicine, you
would think that in this day and age, that there would be enough
172 PERSUASION ENGINEERING
of a calendar that these insurance companies would get it together.
But I think that your lobby needs to do some serious work,
especially in the US. because I mean you walk around and there is
a lot of bent people with back pains and stuff and I mean you can
give people drugs until you are blue in the face but it's not going to
help. A friend of mine owns a sports medical clinic, which is our
way of doing chiropractics for five times the price. And he
actually has five or six chiropractors working there. What he did
is, he got one doctor that. . . everybody that comes in, sees him
and he writes prescriptions and they get the chiropractic stuff, they
get massages, they can go in and exercise and, to attract people, to
make sure that they did come in, he fills this place with the most
beautiful women you have ever seen. I mean everywhere you turn
there is some beautiful woman asking you if you want something.
You know would you like a glass of juice, would you like a
massage anytime you want, when you are under treatment in this
place and there is like a line in this building. When I went in there
the first time, it didn't strike me right away. But suddenly I
noticed, and then I thought to myself, "How do they stay so nice in
here?" And then I discovered that he had his own hairdresser and
makeup artist and that, literally, they go in in the morning and they
doll everybody up in the place. The guys all look like they are
Adonis, and suddenly you feel out of shape. I don't care who you
are. A guy that I went in with is a football player from our local
football team and this guy is in shape and his hands are so huge.
And I was going to demonstrate to them . .. I do a lot of body work
with people . . . and I was going to demonstrate to the people there
how to work with wrists, because wrists are very complicated,
there are more bones in your wrists and your ankles then just about
anywhere. In fact, you have more than you have in all the rest of
your body put together. And when I walked in this place and I was
going around, I noticed that, here
OBJECTIONS 173
are these people and they were doing all these strange things with
machines and stuff, and sounds catch me, by the way. And sud-
denly as I was walking along, I realized that, that room sounded
like steel monkeys fucking. That's what it sounded like to me. I
give sounds names that's how I remember them. And I turned
around and I looked at this guy the football player, who is a little
concerned, because he didn't know what he was in for, he just
knew that his career depended on it. . . because when your job is to
run very very fast and to catch the football. . . then every once in a
while you come up with your wrist bent. And his wrist was in a lot
of pain, and they've done some orthoscopic surgery, which is
sneaky surgery, and they've done all of this work on this thing.
And when they were done, his hand was messed up and it just
wouldn't work. It was a very expensive way of getting it to hurt in
a new direction and my way to do it is I just put things where they
are now. Because not everybody conveniently has got the same
body. The principal of rolphers is they put everything back where
it belongs, but when you don't have everything, they don't know
what to do. I get a tremendous amount of people who have
phantom limb pain. They've had a limb or an arm, especially dur-
ing the Vietnam war, which for whatever reason, that gets
removed in an accident. And it's not there and it hurts. And this is
a real problem for normal medical doctors. And people come in
and they say, "It hurts here." Well it's all in your head but it does-
n't feel like it's in your head. The nerves in their body are telling
them that something exists where it isn't.
Now if you keep this in mind, one thing is, that I find that any
objection you get in a sale is like phantom limb pain. You cut off
something and it hurts where it's not. Part of your job is to be able
to move through and to know where these things would come and
to make sure that while you are packaging, 'cause to me it goes
like this: to get their attention, establish enough rapport to know
174--------------------------------------------------PERSUASION ENGINEERING
how they are organized, where their pictures are, where their belief
system is, and then to begin to package what you know about your
product so that it will go through their decision process first and
number two, so that you can inoculate against any kind of
objection.
Now, the one thing that you need to be able to do in order to
do this is to have your sensory acuity so heightened that you can
just really detect yes and no signals because you need to find out
what objections they're gonna have.
So, one of the things I've found through the years is that it's
very helpful to learn to be a crystal ball gazer. So what we are
going to do is we are going to start out by making you members of
the psychic hot line. But not the one that you call up, but the one
that you visit. Now the thing is, that, if you remember just like
when I told you that you could take your hand and move it from
curved to flat. "Ffftt." Make a little sound like that. And you go
"Fffttt" and you get a nice thing which allows you to lock. For
example, I've had people say, "Now I don't want you to think
about this." They come into a car lot and when you walk up to
them, they go, "I'm just here looking." Well they weren't talking,
yet. I knew that. But basically they are trying to elude to me, that
they came in to look at cars, not to buy one. Now, I know better. If
they wanted to look at cars, they are all over the road. They are
everywhere, they are all over the damn place. Whizzing by, you
can stand on a corner and see just about every kind of car there is.
So if they come in to a car lot, I know that there is just enough of
them that wants to buy a car that I can have my way with them.
Now, the problem is that most people's decision strategies have
things where they go back and forth, to try to find out if they've
made a decision.
They'll go, "It looks like a good opportunity but I don't feel
ready, yet." So that when you pace people you really have to
"<«
OBJECTIONS 175
remember to pace all of them because when people go, "Oh no,
I'm just looking", I'll say to them, "But you feel that you really
want it." And they go, "Yeah, but it looks so expensive." I've
already reversed it. The trick is to get the kinesthetics on your side,
'cause they always win. Did you ever notice that? That's why
people have such trouble dieting, you know. They go, "It looks
awfully rich in calories, but I feel I want to stuff it in my body."
Great advertisement, by the way for chocolate, this is an
advertisement I saw, it's a billboard, shaped like a refrigerator, and
the outside of the refrigerator is decorated with candy. It doesn't
even say anything, but there is an arrow pointing straight down
next to it and underneath it is a candy store. "Candied refrigerator,
buy it." That's my kind of advertisement.
Now, the thing I want you to do, is I want you to hold one
hand up and take the other one, then I want you to imagine
between them a curved object. And I want you to take your hand
and put it on there so that you can actually make the object real.
Now when you take your crystal ball, the trick is to lower it down
so that it's just below eye level 'cause remember it doesn't exist.
Well, some people forget that and they look at it, like there is
going to be something in it. The trick is not to hypnotize yourself
here. The trick is that you are learning to do something with
unconscious communication. Now, as you go through, what we
are going to do is, we are going to start the thing about going to
"Psychics For Sales". What I want you to do is to sit down with a
partner and I want you to look at your crystal ball and I want you
to go through, and remember, have your list down where you can
see it and begin to package a presentation that says, "I see chiro-
practics in your future." And you go, "Oh, I see you have some
concerns about chiropractics." And then I want you to start to go
through a listing program: "Oh, it's becoming clearer and clearer
now. Oh, I see you have some fear that it's going to be painful.
176 PERSUASION ENGINEERING
Many foolish people think that. People think, they think it's going
to be more painful than the way that they live."
Bureaucracy, it's no wonder. Chiropractics works too well for
it to be accepted by insurance companies. It would be too intelli-
gent of a decision.
I have an insurance company come to me and say they wanted
to run a test. They wanted to find out if my, and only my, certified
Neuro-Linguistic Programmers, because they have tried others .. .
they wanted to use them for working with people who were
alcoholics.
Most places treat them and then when they let them out they
get drunk again. This doesn't seem like a very good treatment
program and then they have to spend more money. So we ran an
experiment and I gave them the names of my certified practition-
ers and for five years or so they compared the results of my people
verses other treatment programs. Now the result was so bent. This
is how bent it was: that it didn't look like a legitimate statistic.
That's what they told me. So we're not allowed to give insurance
because we did too well. I said, "Well, you want us to go back and
make some of them alcoholics again?" And he said it was too late.
If we had done that earlier . . .
Anyway, once you have your crystal ball, what I want you to
do is to begin to slowly go through your sales pitch and I want you
to ham this up, play it up a little bit, but mostly I want you to con-
centrate, that if you do this, 'cause you can really do this with peo-
ple. It's amazing you can say, for example, "I see in my crystal ball
something in her future that has to do with sex." You start
blushing already, they go, "Yeah, what is it?" It's wonderful, too.
But it's so unorthodox. Now, and you know about it already.
"Could it be," and then you begin to run through a listing program
where you go, through these objections, you can say, "Oh you're
afraid of chiropractics. So your major concern is that, that you
OBJECTIONS 177
won't be able to make the time, no no , is it about money? or it, it's
unclear," and as you begin to go through ... list the objections,
you'll begin to notice that you get non verbal responses, that there
are things that people respond to, more intensely than others. As
soon as you locate one, and when you start getting it, these are the
things to look for.
Now remember the peripheral part of your vision watches for
movement. The phobic part of your vision is what you see with. So
when you take a crystal ball, you always want to get it so that you
put it in front of their eyes. Move it off to the side a little bit, so
that you and they are looking at the same thing, but watch for
movement with your peripheral vision. Now as you begin to play
with this a little bit make a few jokes and stuff. I even do this kind
of thing, like sometimes, I say "Now, I know that you want to buy
a house and I'm not sure exactly what the things that you are
looking for in a house are, I'd have to be a crystal ball gazer," and I
literally go, "I'd have to have a crystal ball. Are you looking for
two or three bedrooms?" You can go through and in a matter of
moments elicit all the information that you need. Because, you'll
get all the unconscious responses about what the characteristics are
of what they want, and then simultaneously go through and find
them, and then you go, "And I know that you are pretty worried
about the price." Now, if you don't get a head nod on that one, I
go, "Or else it really doesn't matter that much. Why, I have this
place over here in such and such a space, it's a big house, it's a
wonderful house, it's a house most other people, other than you
wouldn't be able to afford, but now, inside your mind, there is
another place ..."
Now as you go through this each and everyone of those objec-
tions I want you to begin to build a frame for it, that makes it so
that it's an idiotic thing to do, or else . . . and I want you to point
out the characteristics about what makes it foolish. For example,
178 PERSUASION ENGINEERING
if you were more efficient as a human being and felt better, you're
going to make more money. And also some people think you have
to go to a chiropractor for life because people are always talking
about wanting to get adjustments and it's that when people start
feeling better, they start wanting to do it more. It only takes a cer-
tain amount of time to get used to . . . to get you so you are really
back on track. But you know, sometimes people find that it makes
them feel so much better that they want even more. But I wouldn't
be worried wanting to be too healthy, yet.
Let's just start at the beginning. The task is: build your crystal
ball. Remember, whenever you want to create a curve surface,
build one out so that you can see it. So that you have that texture.
If you hallucinate it, it's much easier. And put it in the right place
and say, "It'll be wonderful. More than you ever expected."
Isn't it nice to not be disappointed? It requires adequate plan-
ning. You have to think of something that will make you feel
good, rather than when you feel bad. I always tell all my clients
that disappointment requires adequate planning, so don't. Only
plan for delight and that's what you'll find. Okay, now, make sure
your objections in your own mind are concise ... it should be
things that you should write in a few words, not in a paragraph
because your clients will be very distinct in whatever it is. They'll
go "Well yeah, aren't people afraid to live in this neighborhood?"
And I go, "Yes, some people are, but you know that was back in
the fifties. They are all dead. Do you have a calendar by the way?"
Remember temporal predicates are one of the best ways to
move a problem. Move it into the past. Move their hopes into the
future, become clairvoyant. That is, learn to watch for unconscious
cues because in them, you'll find the answers to how to avoid
everything. Go forth.
Well I've had a bunch of people come in and seeing how much
harder they could make this. What it is about human beings, and
OBJECTIONS 179
their ability to take the simple and make it complex? Only human
beings can screw up fucking. I constantly get these calls, and the
person that works for me comes up to me and goes, "Well he
wants an appointment. But he wouldn't say what it is." Ummm, we
know what it is.
If you let your natural processes as a human being . . . your
ability to speak is hard wired. You don't have to look at pictures
and know what to say. It doesn't come out good that way. And
when you speak, listen to yourself. If you say the wrong thing
change it. Remember the nice thing about words is they disappear
just as you say them. You know the trick of trying to hold images
in your mind is not the way to become clear as a human being.
Although many individuals believe that. If you've got that kind of
a theory, you would become so clear you had one picture, and
you'd get stuck in it. And believe me, I've had many, many clients
that are that way. The trick is to understand that there aren't good
and bad things. There's a notion from psychology that people are
broken and all this stuff. Get it out of your minds.
Realize that there is nothing wrong with being compulsive.
You just want to make sure that you put the right things through
the compulsion machine. I mean think of right now, every human
being that exists has compulsions and has fetishes. Now, this is
not good or bad, the problem is that they are sniffing shoes. The
problem isn't that they want to do something all the time, the
problem is what they put through the machine. The machine itself
is lovely. What if you were compulsive about getting things done.
Wouldn't that be nice? What if you had a fetish for cold calling.
Now suddenly it doesn't sound so bad. You wouldn't go into a
psychologist and go, "You know, hey man, I just have to make
these calls and have to make more money all the time."
I tried an experiment one time, I had the unusual experience of
running a friend's company when he got sick. He went to a for-
180 PERSUASION ENGINEERING
eign country, checked into a hotel and then was hospitalized with-
in forty-eight hours. He got legionnaire's disease. By the way
legionnaire's disease is completely curable. Don't you remember in
Philadelphia all those guys from the American Legion went in this
hotel, and they all died? Like thirty seven of them died in this
hotel. Well it turns out that nobody had to die. The center for dis-
ease control goofed because when they always checked out bacte-
ria to try to isolate diseases. What they do is they take samples and
they put them in what amounts to a little oven, cook them up and
when they multiply then they can see them. Well it turns out that
legionnaire's disease is a mutant form of bacteria that lives and
thrives in air conditioners. In other words, you would have to put it
in the refrigerator to get it to multiply. And they never noticed
anything like that.
I'm a firm believer in placebos. I think that placebos are a great
thing. Every drug in the US is tested against placebos. That means
we know a lot more about placebos than anything. But the FDA
doesn't look at it that way, because you know, these are the people
that say, "Let me look at that." (as they cover their face) Why do
they have to cover their face? What, too much light gets in there,
their ideas get blurry? I mean what's the story here? What happens
here is that the people just aren't thinking. If placebos' work and
you know, it's amazing the results they get with these things. For
most things placebos will work eight out of ten times as good as
something else. So I decided that one time to put a product out on
the market called placebo. At the time Robert Dilts was my
graduate student and I loved being a professor: you had slaves. It
appealed to my inner nature ... and we called them graduate
students. Some of you were slaves and you know what I'm talking
about.
But anyway, Robert came in and I said, "Robert, I want you to
go down and I want you get all the studies that have been done, I
OBJECTIONS 181
want all the research of placebos for all the following things." And
I had taken headaches and all the common household stuff. And
then I put it all in a little book so what you got was a little bottle of
empty gelatin capsules. I didn't even bother to put anything in
them. These were just empty gelatin capsules and you'd look up
and if you had a headache, you'd open it up and you'd read and
find out that four out of five times placebos work as well as
aspirin, so you would take six just to be safe. Well it worked for
me. I tried it, it worked. You know, okay, and I'd take six of them
and it would be gone. Well the FDA thought and went out and said
I couldn't do this. I'm giving people nothing. "I'm sorry. Placebos.
This is not going to work. So you can't do it."
I don't know if you've read the side of food containers. I read
one the other day. You read this and some of these things sound
like the contents of a bomb. There is like fifty six different things
in a can of pudding. I mean my memory having made pudding
from scratch was that it didn't take fifty things. And I said, "Well
maybe they're food coloring and I looked at it, and I said if any-
body deliberately tried to make it this color, they should be shot."
It was butterscotch pudding, by the way." I mean it kind of looked
more like something that should come out of somebody than go
into them . . . anyway when my friend got sick, he had to leave the
country because in order to get the kind of treatments that he
wanted to get he had to go somewhere else.
He flew to Switzerland, and they did something that, according
to the FDA in our country, hasn't been proven. However, now he
doesn't have the disease. But of course that doesn't count, because
it could have spontaneous remission. Whatever that means. I've
had a lot of those in my career, by the way. We've used hypnosis
to do all kinds of stuff and anytime I've done it, with any kind of
cancerous substance whatsoever ... I mean, we've done it where
they've had X-rays . . . you can see there is
182 PERSUASION ENGINEERING
this big thing and we used hypnosis and they would go back and it
would be gone and they said, "Well yeah, but that was probably
spontaneous remission." And I said, "Yeah, timely spontaneous
remission."
Well while my friend was gone and I had his business, 'cause
he asked me, "I have to leave and I have to leave tonight and I
have the warning, and everybody that I know is a thief." And he
said, "If I left my business to anybody else, they would run it into
the ground. If you'll come and run it, I'll probably come back and
be making more money than I ever did." And he said, "And I'm
going to need a lot of it, 'cause this unproven procedure I am going
to use, costs a lot of money." Not to mention the fact that going to
Switzerland, always costs a lot of money. And if you've been
there, and know what I'm talking about. A cup of coffee is $10, if
you're not Swiss, by the way. If you are over there, learn to imitate
the Swiss accent, at least, otherwise the price of everything
quadruples. You didn't know that, but I've got news for you, you'll
find out. The Swiss are prejudice against everyone. And for a
price. It's not that they hate, they just charge for not being Swiss,
right? Did you ever notice that the Swiss, have the largest
denomination of bills? Right, you can't get a $1000 bill in
America. But in Switzerland they are all over the place. We need
them and they give them to tourists, so that we can buy things like
coffee. And sweaters. And I've never seen a country like that, they
have on every corner a pastry shop and a watch store and a
chocolate store. Those of you who have been there, know what I
am talking about. I mean every time you turn around they're con-
stantly going, "Oh it's time for chocolate. Well, better have a pas-
try, you know." You'd think they would come in and go, "I'm
Swiss." But they are not. Because they are too busy being in stress
because they are on the stress diet. One of the most effective ones
I know of.
OBJECTIONS -183
Any of you ever had a terrible crisis go on and discover you
lose weight? It's Richard's new stress diet, the one that I am using
with people. I just put them in an absolute and utter stress. And
they either die of a heart attack or lose weight. Works pretty good.
Anyway, when I had this business, it wasn't something that I
was accustomed to. They sold women's lingerie, and they manu-
factured it and they didn't have stores or anything, at that time
anyway. And at the time I was twenty three years old and I forgot
to ask him, "What do you do?" 'cause he's somebody that I know, I
had just gone diving with him. So I went down and I went into
where the factory was. And he had this guy, he was sort of second
in command and started showing me around and when I realized
that what they sold was women's lingerie, I thought. "Hmmmm, a
rare and unprecedented opportunity to find. . ." all they did was
manufacture and then sell to stores and then, of course, the stores
had to sell it before they would order more, which seemed very
inefficient to me. What I thought about was dating . . . just popped
right into my mind. I said, "Now, what if we could get guys to
have a way of having lingerie to meet women." And this guy
running this place looked at me and said, "Your nuts." And I said,
"Yes, I am, and proud." I thought, "What if we could just have a
way that people could just send us the money directly," and the
guy said, "What do you mean?" I said, "it's called a catalog." And
this was a long time ago. Now they have catalogs for everything.
It struck me, that, if you were going to sell lingerie, maybe you
should use women. And it just popped into my mind. I don't know
why. But anyway, he had a sales force, he had five guys and they
went around to stores and they went in and they'd get these buyers
at the department stores to buy some stuff. But anyway, we tried
taking pictures of all the things and gave some description and put
it in a catalog and then I started a program by which
184 PERSUASION ENGINEERING
people could have, because I believe in the concept of having more
than one business, that people could take the catalogs, they could
go out, pass them out and then if people ordered off of that, and
had their insignia that was actually printed into the catalog and
they would just get a check in the mail. So if I walked up to you on
the street and handed you a catalog, and you ordered out of it then,
I would get a check.
So then I took a bunch of people and I said, "Look this is a rare
and unprecedented opportunity for you, in your spare time, to
constantly make money." You could mail them out if you wanted
to. I didn't care what they did. And what a great way to meet peo-
ple. At the time I had this thing called the flirting class. But we
just did that as a lark just for fun. When I taught the flirting class,
what I discovered is that there are some people that don't know
how to say "Hello". Now this is why we want to begin to build
new fetishes. Those of you who cold call on the phone, and those
of you who prospecting for whatever it is, think about it. When
you drive down the road as a chiropractor, you look at all those
bent and broken people, every building is just full of people that
can't even get up that well. Think about all of the insurance com-
panies that are carrying heavy loads of people on disability. I don't
know about you, if I got paid to be injured, my body would
probably hurt like hell. The problem is, you can't get any insurance
company to pay you as much as I make for being broken.
Most people don't know that feeling good is better than feeling
bad, because they're not any good at feeling good. Now, the
concept that I want to get across to you is, I know every single per-
son reading this has got a fetish. I'm not crystal ball gazing, am I.
And I know for some of you it's very intense. Now if you could
take the feeling you had for example, chocolate. When I say that, I
look around and you should, too. I'm crystal ball gazing. When
you are, look around a little bit.
OBJECTIONS 185
Stop and think, how many people will see, Godiva chocolates?
I don't like chocolate, but there are people, who, when you say the
word "Godiva" everything in their sole goes wild. The reason I am
saying that is to find out who they are. Now, because I'm not really
looking for somebody who wants to sniff shoes, but we are just
trying to find something that we can convert to something else.
The trick is, we are looking for the fetishes. You remember
you are reading this to learn things. You know the stuff between
your ears? There is a purpose why that thing is there: it's called
thinking. I want you to use it to concentrate on what we are doing
here. Don't think about the candy and the lingerie, think about the
training that's behind it. Or . . . can be done.
It's a great line "can be done". People say, "Well, I have a prob-
lem like that." And you go, "Can be done." Instead of if they go,
"Oh, what a beautiful car." And you go, "Just." And that's a very
important word, just. Keep it in mind. It means only. Let's see, just
keep that thought.
You know that little exercise you did with the submodalities
earlier? You went through and you found out about the difference
between the strong belief and something that was not a strong
belief. Now, we are going to do that again, only this time, what we
are going to do is a little different. You can do this content free so
that you get something good. Get yourself a partner and I want you
to have that person think of something for which they have an
absolute and overwhelming fetish. They have to have it, they have
to do it. They are compulsed. When they even think about it they
should glow. If they don't glow have them pick something else.
Now, I want you to have them think of the thing they have the
fetish for and then I want you to also ask them, where they would
like to have a compulsion. Do they not cold call enough? We want
to build in a driving, pulsing force in you that gets you to be
186 PERSUASION ENGINEERING
successful. It's not enough to have skills to know what to do. You
have to become carnivorous. What I did was, I installed in this
friend's of mine business, I took all the people and I sat them down
and I gave everyone of them, no matter what they did, the guy
who worked the warehouse, the accountant, even the telemarketers
I gave them a compulsion to cold call.
The guy in the warehouse said that in spare minutes, he would
go over to the pay phone and call people. Why not? It was like,
"Gee could I have a few minutes off to go out and use the tele-
phone, man?" "I thought of a few more people I could call and
send catalogs to, man." And I said, "Well, I don't know, maybe ten
minutes, but make it fast, ten minutes, man, how many calls can
you make in ten minutes?" "Oh, man I can make like fifty calls in
like ten minutes, man." "Hey, there's somebody on the phone, get
off the phone. It's my pay phone, get away from the phone, no, no
it's mine, mine, mine."
I installed a lot of pay phones. I made money off that, too. See,
multiple businesses, you've got to get them going, get them
coming, get them from every direction.
I made every single person at the company a marketing agent.
Everybody, now, can make commissions at the company, even
people who don't work there can make commissions. I now have a
vehicle to build and then it struck me. I wanted to have the biggest
sales force that any company has ever had. So, I went to the Boy
Scouts of America. However, they didn't like my idea. But we did
come up with something for them, but I thought you know, they
are always coming by selling candies, selling something. What if
they came by and sold something that you really wanted.
I said, "There's a half a million people in Future Farmers of
America." Members, these are 14 year-old boys by the way, 14
year-old girls who need money to pay for their cow or whatever it
is. So they come by and they sell. . . you know, it's a guilt sale .
OBJECTIONS 187
. . one of those. They go, "Well, my son needs to go to camp, you
know, can you buy some candy bars?" You know this one? Well if
they come by and they want to sell you some junky candy or some
tickets to some game you won't go buy. But think about it, if they
came by and offered you a teddy? That would be different,
wouldn't it? They'd say, "I'm selling these teddy's, look in this
catalog you can have anything." Sexy brochures, you know. Not
only would they be making more money for their projects, but
they would be getting a future education. I thought it was a good
idea.
Anyway, we had to give them something else to sell. We actu-
ally gave them books on agriculture. But I kept looking, "where
could I find a group of people to do this?" And I discovered, it was
so simple: college. I sent my guys up to college, they would go in
and they'd go, "Who needs extra money?" You're starting to notice
these rhetorical questions. "Is there somebody here that needs
some extra money?" "You. Feeling a little poor today are we?"
Now, the thing that I want you to do is I want you to illicit and
this time it's with an "I". Illicit a response, with an "I". Don't sound
it out, man it won't help. Finetics, F let's see F fafafa, what word is
that pohonics, pa pa pa honics. What a stupid system that is. Good,
sound out the word angiogram and by the time you get to the end
of the word, you'll need one. Now, what I want you to do is to go
through and get all the summages, mark down, don't make this into
a big thing. Just on your list, mark down only the things that are
different between the way they experience. For example, if you
have somebody who, in their business, if they would make a lot
more money . . . this is the question, "What would you like to be
compulsive to do and it would make sure that you made a lot more
money?" If you looked at a telephone and had to cold call... if
every time a new prospect was there, you walked
188 PERSUASION ENGINEERING
across the room . . . because a lot of people, when they see a cus-
tomer walk in, it's like gravity gets heavy and it's like that dating
thing ... the hardest part was getting these guys to walk over and
say hello. 1 used to actually take them in a course, it's not on
video, but when I taught the flirting course, I would take thirty
guys to a shopping mall because . . . I don't know why they go to
bars, there aren't any good women in bars, they're all in the
shopping malls. If you want to find good women, go to Neman
Markus. And they are all over the place. And they are in a height-
ened state of awareness where they feel really good.
And then just go stand in the jewelry department. And they'll
walk up and they'll go, "Do you work here?" and you'll go, "No,
but I can help you." And then you look at them and you go, "Do
you want to feel really good?" When they go in these malls they
are like the great white hunters. They are just like stalking that
sale. It's really something. You could select them by departments,
stores every thing. You go, "What am I in the mood for, today?
Designer, I want a designer woman . . . let's see, so I will go up to
that second story and go into that" . . . you know you can even
pick their economic levels . . . everything. When you want a
woman who will buy you presents, you go into this department,
and when you are feeling generous you go into that department.
Ummmmm.
It's just getting your brains to think about prospecting it's just a
metaphor for .. . I'm a hypnotist remember? But there isn't any
metaphor like a true metaphor, is there? 'Cause there are some
guys in there right now, "Go in the mall, pick up chicks" . . . "and
then if you want chicks to buy you presents, you go to the designer
thing and I never feel generous so we won't write that down ..."
The other great place too, is those haircutting salons. I, like
you just wander into those places, and sit down and stare at some-
OBJECTIONS 189
body while they are having their hair cut or while they are having
a dye or. something. They'll go, "What are you looking at?" And
then you go, "You look so beautiful." 'cause that's why they are
there. They call that pacing . . . Richard style. And then you say to
them, "Are you going to be free after this?" What no, they are
going to go to jail? Don't ask them if they are going to go some-
where, if you just ask if they are going to be free and then tell
them where to meet you. You see, don't bring up objections and
you won't get them. I know some of you guys, I've heard the shit
that you say, it's so terrible and it embarrasses them so. Oh, I heard
one the other night, let's see, this guy walks up to this woman, this
has got to be the worst line, and he goes, "So, uh, babe, what are
you here for?" What the fuck does that mean? I don't even know
what that means. "Hey, babe what are you here for?"
I noticed on the side of somebody's video tape once, they had a
tape they made about not smoking, that if you look at it, it says
(No. 1), I know they want it to say "Number one." But if the
unconscious remembers analog, it comes out "No one." So if you
have no one smoking tape, then the unconscious is going to look at
it from the side and go, "Couldn't be for me, because it's not for
any one." So maybe we'll be changing the title of that. There's a lot
of times, people think something is going to have one meaning and
it has another, and the trick is, are you interested in pride or cash?
And my thing is, I'll take the cash, fuck the pride.
Now what I want you do to is to get yourself a partner, and
when you have the partner, I want you to go through and when
you have all the submodalities of the thing they have a fetish for,
then what I want you to do is to take the thing they want, and I
want you to go, "Fffffttt" and pull it up inside, the same location,
make it the same size and the same distance all the things that
constitute . . . and you will discover suddenly, you have a fetish
190 PERSUASION ENGINEERING
for it. Now, then have them close their eyes and I want you to
double the size of the image. And I want you to give them, a kick
ass post hypnotic suggestion. It says that every time they see this
they are going to drool and that's going to just force them to
quadruple their income.
Money is the root of all evil. So let's get down to the root of
the matter. See, it doesn't say that it is evil, it just says that it is the
root. So as long as we keep the roots clipped everything will be
fine. We can dry those roots out and make tea out of it. And then
tell people, who make those kinds of metaphors ... to wait. The
rest of you get to it, now.
(Demonstration subject) Well let's see here. Come here Ted,
come up here. Just sit down, right here. Take this (pen) and you
don't need this (his book), just sign right there. That's how you get
them to close. You can go now, Ted. If you can't give commands
by that time, you haven't paced the shit out of them, that's all that I
can say. I find that as, I call it the pen interrupt pattern, which is
done this way. (Still demonstrating) Yeah, you, too, your soul is
mine. You touched the pen.
See I always find at that point in time, that something that
uplifts a little bit, I throw them the pen, roll it off the end of the
clip board. Whatever it is, something that gets them to respond
physically. Remember, if you give them too much time, at that
point in time, people have been trained all over the world that
when you hand them the contract, to have a bad feeling. Jump over
it. A lot of times, people say, "Well I should read this." And you
go, "Well you'll have a copy at home." That's the best time to do it.
By that time they should already know the details.
People would say, "What about financing?" And I'd go, "Your
credit is good with me, we'll work that out later" because after all,
if they don't have credit then we won't give them the car, right?
But after all it shouldn't be a painful process.
OBJECTIONS 191
I've always thought it was an amazing thing that you could go
out and buy a shirt for fifty bucks and feel better. You go out and
buy a car, and you feel worse because of the process that you're
put through, in most of this stuff. And most of it is analog, because
the people who are doing the selling start to get a feeling, that
something is going to go wrong, so they induce it. That's what
happens.
Buying a house, this is one of the amazing things. They go,
"Give us a check for $1000 and we can get you into escrow and
then we'll begin . . ." and I like this "the long process of escrow." It
already sounds like it has weight on it. You shouldn't feel that. See
when I do it, the minute they sign you want to go, "Oh boy, how
exciting! Congratulations!", because the more you put that
congratulations on the end of it, the more you become uplifted.
Then there is another thing which I do, is I'll stop and I'll look at
them and I'll take the contract and I'll go, "I changed my mind" and
I'll grab a hold of the edge of it and start to tear it up because I
always want to make a check to make sure that I am not going to
get any buyer's remorse. It is amazing the minute you go to tear up
the contract they go, "Huh, what are you doing?" And I'll stop and
I'll say, "Well look, let me put it this way, are you sure, that this is
the right thing?" And they'll go, "Yeah." And I'll go, "because you
have to be absolutely sure, sure enough that you are going to tell
everyone you know."
And I'll tell you one of the toughest sales that people have to
make is door to door sales, because for some reason people have
become suspicious of this process, anyway. I worked for a com-
pany called Celebrity China. And they sell China door to door.
And this is a tough sale. Because they have to overcome every
stigmatism there is. In the US they have a law which says people
have 72 hours to change their mind. Now, if you have 72 hours to
change your mind, most of the time the people wouldn't if it
192 PERSUASION ENGINEERING
weren't for their friends and loved ones. People would do this,
they'd go, "You bought china from a door to door salesman?" Now
to begin, with the china was beautiful. Actually, it was because
every meal that we had was on different china and china breaks.
There is nothing like unnerving people. They have these beau-
tiful crystal glasses. I kept taking them and tapping them on things
and finding if they would shatter. I wanted to know. Because I had
bought china one time and beautiful crystal. But then I had kids.
Now, I learned, I spent ten years in the melmac club. And I wanted
to find something a little heartier but, anyway we had beautiful
crystallabra things, like you guys would be sitting there now, they
had little tables in front of you and you had a beautiful thing
stuffed in noshuan and crystal. Great idea for a conference. We
nibbled our way through for three days. Bit by bit, piece by piece.
But anyway, they all told me that the toughest thing was, that
they didn't know how to deal with this. So, when I told them, I
said, "Me, I always start to rip the contract and when you look at
people and you say, look if you're absolutely sure, because one of
the things you need to do is to future pace or inoculate and protect
people against buyer's remorse." Because most of the time it is
induced by other people. Cause they would be real excited and
they would tell somebody, "I bought this china from this guy that
came by from the door." And people go, "What?" They go, "You
bought china from a door to door salesman?" You must have been
ripped off. Now, these guys said, "How can we avoid it?" And I
said, "Don't." I said, "Before you go and you hold up the contract
and you start you go, "Your not ready for this." And people go,
"Wait, what do you mean, I'm not ready." And I go, "Don't you
know what's going to happen?" I said, "It's going to be your sister,
it's going to be your brother, it's going to be your uncle, it's going
to be your next door neighbor, you feel good now, don't
OBJECTIONS 193
you?" And they'll go, "Yeah." And I go, "Would you let anybody
steal your good feelings?" I said, "Every time, you see this
brochure here, I want you to feel this wonderful. Every time you
look at your table set with beautiful china and crystal, I want you
to feel wonderful. I want to know for sure that you feel better than
you feel right now, do you understand?" And people go, "Yes."
And I go, "Well, people are going to come in and say, "Oh, but it's
the wrong pattern." And I always exaggerate it. I use what I refer
to as the synthetic twerp phenomenon. Because that's what these
people are when somebody comes into your house and goes, "Oh,
but you paid too much but blah blah blah ..." And I imitate them
and I go, "And if you can let any one of those people get to you, if
you're not ready to look at them and just laugh, because they just
want to deprive you of your happiness . . .". I say, "Are you sure
enough in your conviction that you have now . .. cause otherwise
I'll rip this up and go sell it to someone who deserves it."
You're getting into this, aren't you? Well it's the only way I feel
that you can really protect people, when they drive up with a new
car and they go, "You bought a Chrysler?" Give me a break. Let
alone people coming home in a Mercedes they go, "Boy, they must
have seen you coming." And every line that I know ... well, they
didn't see you, they lured you. To me it was like fishing. I even
brought a fishing pole to work. Put a sign on it. And said "Enter
Here." Put it out on the street and you know people turned in. They
had a sign inside their head. It said, "Help me." You see people are
not good at buying themselves presents. People aren't good at
things, like if you sell insurance. Insurance, is a wonderful thing
but it's no good, if it doesn't give you what it's really supposed to,
which is peace of mind. How many of you have rented a car at the
airport and they ask you would you like the insurance and I say,
"What does the insurance get you?" And that means, "if there is
any damage to the car whatsoever, you don't have to
194 PERSUASION ENGINEERING
worry." And I thought, "What a great thing. I can go out and
smash this fucker all up." Hey, you know, the next time you feel
kind of frustrated and stuff you know, go down to the airport, rent
a car for the afternoon, pay the ten bucks, you can bang it off of
walls, everything. I turned in one one time, that there wasn't even a
panel left on the thing, that didn't have dings in it. The front was
smashed in, the side was gouged out and when I pulled up the guy
said, "What happened?" And I said, "I don't know, I pulled into a
Seven Eleven and I came out and it was like this." It was a great
thing. We actually used to go and rent them in pairs and have
demolition derby's with them. Sixteen cars at Avis and I thought
they were going to be all over my ass, because I got carried away
that week. And I got a big package like this, from Avis in the mail.
And I thought, "Oh shit, they are going to sue me or something."
And I opened it up and you know, Avis gave me a credit card.
They said, we like this guy, he rents lots of cars. Sometimes two
and three at a time. Sometimes we never even left the parking lot.
We just smashed them up right there. But see, if you have the right
attitude about what a product provides, what a service provides . . .
look, I want you to know that when you bought insurance, you
bought what you buy as a sense of security that you don't have to
worry that if you buy renter's insurance in your own apartment,
you walked out . . . You should turn around and look at the door
and go, "It doesn't matter who steals anything. I get a new one."
What a great deal.
We have phenomenal things available to us in this country.
The fact that you could literally go out and buy a better body with-
out exercise. It's very cool, you go in and people just move the
bones around and make you feel better. You can go out and buy
massages.
I don't know about you but I don't like the idea of having to go
out and hunt down animals everyday and shoot them or dig-
OBJECTIONS 195
ging up roots. I think the supermarket's the coolest thing around.
And as you go by, oh we'll have a little slice of cow. A little slice
of lamb. Oh, how about a bird that flew through the air, and a fish
in the sea. To me, one of the things that people who are in the
business of selling and in the business of persuasion need to
understand is that the whole process is a wonderful thing. The fact
that human beings have so much trouble over all, running their
brains, they need us. So that they can enjoy the process of being a
wanton consumer. I don't know about you, I have people who
actually get mad 'cause they get catalogs in the mail. Not me. I go
through each and every one, and I go, "Oh, that would feel good,
ummmm, ahhhhhh, ummmmm."
And people need to be taught to enjoy the generation that we
live in. Because I have noticed that the people who do not spend
money do not make money. You know those people who are
always saving every dime. They are always broke. Now, I don't
know where it goes, but it goes to something else. Plus they never
know how to use money and enjoy it. They might as well not
make it. If your ability to realize that you can make it, especially in
the free societies that we live in . . . Just think we could be living
where ... who are these people? Do you realize that So Damn
Insane was elected? Who did he run against, Completely Insane?
"Yes, we'll vote for So Damn Insane, we don't want Completely
Insane as our leader, then there's Totally Insane." To me, people
like that need to be taught a lesson, and I don't think it was done. I
think that the fact that people want to reelect people like that.
Instead we should be buying them presents. Like a six by six
condo. You know what that is? It's a mausoleum. I always hear
that song, "There is a place for him" and I always think of that
guy, every time. I have pictures of how much good he can do for
the world when he ain't around no more. Because it takes a lot of
education for a society to be a capitalistic society.
196 PERSUASION ENGINEERING
Our government, they want to take healthcare and turn it over
to the same people that run the post office. I mean, I don't know
about you, but in our country our post office doesn't work all that
well. Plus every few years there is someone up in the tower with a
rifle who used to work there. I don't know what we put on our
stamps in our country. But it is really getting to be a problem. That
out of these psycho's that go out on random shooting sprees in the
US, seven out of ten of them worked at the post office. I don't
know what it is about the post office but I don't go there anymore.
I don't need to be pushed any harder.
I think the thing that I did when they had the presidential elec-
tion, I voted no. Because I think it just encourages them if you
elect them to office.
Now the thing is when you go to close and you should con-
stantly be testing for this. I start right out, sometimes people walk
in and they look at something and I go, "Wonderful isn't it? How
are you going to pay for it? Credit card?" I say, "Give me your wal-
let." Do you know people hand it to you. It always amazed me. I
don't even work in the store sometimes. I'm just there practicing,
you know, and I go, "Give me your wallet." And I'll go through
and I'll go, "Amex, that's the way to pay for it." And then they'll
go, "Uh well, uh my Amex card isn't good anymore." "Well, let's
go through here, what else you got? You've got Visa, Master
Card." What a great thing: Master card. It sounds like something
the Germans would have come up with, doesn't it. "I can pay for
anything I have zee Mastercard."
To me, as long as you go through and you constantly test for
close and you attach good feelings, it's really easy.
» CHAPTER EIGHT.
PRECISION PERSUASION
ENGINEERING'"
Now after you've done the exercises, I want you to stop and
close your eyes, run back into where you came and started here in
the beginning and begin to run through your mind, all the new
things that you got to try. Because you want to connect all this
with your real life. And I want your unconscious at the same time
to begin to sort and search to find and feel all the opportunities
that will be arising for you to do things in new ways so that you
can find life somewhat better. Just think, it's Saturday night, now
where could you use persuasion techniques on a Saturday night, I
stop and I ask yourself inside your mind, "What would be a rare
and unprecedented opportunity to begin to have new experiences?
To make things feel better, to have new opportunities that are
spread right out in front of you?"
Now if you looked at Saturday night in a new way, it's just a
chance to begin to take the skills that you learned and to install
them at the unconscious level, to begin to do things and new ways
to find new things happening, then you will. If you don't, then you
won't. Don't close the book and leave the learning behind. Realize
that it's only the beginning of what you are going
198 PERSUASION ENGINEERING
to do with the rest of your life.
And we want the rest of your life to be quite exciting. And
we want you to begin to master yourself and master each and
every opportunity to do things in new ways. As you are walking
along and you hear people talking, when you hear a great ambi-
guity 1 want you to go, "Oohhh, 1 could use that." Maybe drop
into a few stores tonight and see how shitty people really are at
selling things. Maybe sell something, even where you don't work.
Maybe you could go up and play the role of one of your clients,
that's very tough and find out somebody else will do it.
The world is your learning laboratory.
I noticed when I ask the question, a fair number of you are sin-
gle. And remember sex can kill you now, if you are not careful. It's
not like the 60's, so I want you to experiment but experiment with
protection and realize that you can take things in new directions if
you catch my drift and my thrust. Because if you thrust into new
areas and new ways, you may find that things are a lot easier.
That, when you bathe people in tonality, that when you first
concentrate on your nose, your throat, your chest and then get to
that area by which, you can resonate it . . . spend a little time when
you are in the shower, speaking and listening. You can hear
yourself perfectly there.
Learn to hear what your tone of voice sounds like and to
increase your range. Give yourself the ability to realize the more
that you can let your tonality go "uuuup" and "dooowwwn" the
more variations that you can have in tempo, the more you can
control your syntax and embed questions and know when to
anchor.
Wouldn't it be nice to know when to anchor? For example, one
of my favorite questions boils down to this, "How do you know
when you want to be seduced?" If you don't know, the answer to
that question is it would be very hard to do things. And
PRECISION PERSUASION ENGINEERING 199
if somebody stops and you see their eyes move up, anchor it, say,
"Excuse me a minute," and as they look at you go, " 'cause you
like me. Wouldn't want to do anything exciting, foolish, something
that might take you in whole new directions." And tonight while
you sleep and dream I want the unconscious portion of each of you
because it's been here and it's been close enough to hear. To realize
that it's been learning a lot as well. You see if you package
information in just the right way, a lot of it goes into the conscious
but your unconscious can learn so much faster. And I wanted to
begin to sort and search to the learning of the essence inside
yourself because this particular book doesn't need these learnings.
You need to make sure that everything that each of both of you
has learned here, begins to develop so that while you sleep and
dream I want you to run unconsciously scenario after scenario.
Because in your dreams time means nothing at all. You dream a
week in a minute, a day in a second, so you can begin to run hun-
dreds of thousands of scenarios so that it begins to feel familiar, to
do things in new ways, to begin to make changes that will stay
with you for the rest of your life and make every day a payday in
excitement, cash. Because we still have much to do. You have to
quadruple that income and do it in half the time. And you have to
take that slow time at the bank where things seem to take forever
and experience your orgasms just that way. You see it's not the
bank that makes time go slow, it's your mind, that knows how to
alter time. So while you are altering time inside your dreams,
while you're moving as Einstein did on a beam of light, remember
each new idea is capable of changing everything. And it's not that
you want to change everything. So carefully select unconsciously,
those things that don't suit you anymore. You don't need any more
knots in your gut. You can adjust those backwards . . . untie them,
and then open up to a whole new way. Find yourself doing
200--------------------------------------------------PERSUASION ENGINEERING
more things that are more exciting and get to it. It's time to get out
there in the world and boogie on down.
You can't get a degree in sales, you can't get a degree in per-
suasion, you can get a degree in important stuff, like Greek histo-
ry. Yeah, poetry, Greek history. How about blatant. A language
not spoken anywhere. Listen to this, I had a counselor, this coun-
selor is sitting there and looking at me and she's dressed . . . she
must have weighted about 370 pounds just to start with . . . she had
on a blue and white polka dotted dress, the image is burned in my
mind . . . and white socks, of all things. Her hair looked like she
made it up in a Waring blender and she looks at my file and she
goes, "Mr. Bandler, I noticed you haven't got a single class in
Latin," and I said, "Well everyone that speaks Latin is dead, except
for a few priests and I'm afraid to be around them. I said, "I don't
go out with guys that where dresses." And she said, "This is not a
laughing matter." And I went, "Don't you bet on it." She said,
"Without three years of latin, how do you expect to be able to
learn a language?" And I said, "When I was born, I didn't have any
latin, I didn't have any languages, and I learned the language, I
have a machine in my head that does that." The only institution I
know capable of preventing you from learning the language is the
school system. How many of you went to school, learned a
language and don't know anything about it? It's phenomenal. Only
a school system could do that. You know, you take anybody and
just stick them in a country and they will end up learning the
language, except for our president, who by the way spent a year in
Russia. What the hell was he doing in Russia? What, going over
there and finding out that it is the Mexico of Europe? I'm a kid, I
grew up hiding under desks, for fear the Russians were going to
blow us up. It turns out they can't even make an IC chip. They
can't. They had to steal them from us. And of course, we gave
them just the ones that we wanted to. It's ridiculous.
7S
PRECISION PERSUASION ENGINEERING 201
However, they are very good at sitting in outer space. That's what they
are, They are very good at sitting in outer space. They can sit in outer
space longer than anyone. Boy that scares me. So what I'm really
afraid of is somebody who can hide in the dark. So I decided, we
should make our college.
!
i
* GLOSSARY OF NLP TERMS
i
; Accessing Cues
Subtle behaviors that will both help to trigger and indicate
which representational system a person is using to think with.
• Typical types of accessing cues include eye movements, voice
i tone, tempo, body posture, gestures, and breathing patterns.
Anchoring
j The process of associating an internal response with some 1 external trigger (similar to classical conditioning) so that the
t response may be quickly, and sometimes covertly, reaccessed.
j Auditory i Relating to hearing or the sense of hearing. j j Behavior
! The specific physical actions and reactions through which we
! interact with the people and environment around us.
J Behavioral Flexibility
The ability to vary one's own behavior in order to elicit or
i secure a response from another person.
204 PERSUASION ENGINEERING
Calibration
The process of learning to read another person's unconscious,
nonverbal responses in an ongoing interaction by pairing
observable behavioral cues with a specific internal response.
Calibrated Loop
Unconscious pattern of communication in behavioral cues of
one person trigger specific responses from another person in
an ongoing interaction.
Chunking
Organizing or breaking down some experience into bigger or
smaller pieces. Chunking up involves moving to a larger, more
abstract level of information. Chunking down involves moving
to a more specific and concrete level of information. Chunking
laterally involves finding other examples at the same level of
information.
Congruence
When all of a person's internal beliefs, strategies, and behav-
iors are fully in agreement and oriented toward securing a
desired outcome.
Context
The framework surrounding a particular event. This frame-
work will often determine how a particular experience or event
is interpreted.
Criteria
The values or standards a person uses to make decisions and
judgments.
Deep Structure
Complete representation of the logical semantic relations in a
sentence.
GLOSSARY OF NLP TERMS 205
Four Tuple (or 4-tuple)
A method used to notate the structure of any particular experi-
ence. The concept of the four tuple maintains that any experi-
ence must be composed of some combination of the four pri-
mary representational classes: A,V,K,0 - where A = Auditory,
V = Visual, K = Kinesthetic, and O = Olfactory/ Gustatory.
Future Pacing
The process of mentally rehearsing oneself through some
future situation in order to help ensure that the desired behav-
ior will occur naturally and automatically.
Gustatory
Relating to the sense of taste.
Installation
The process of facilitating the acquisition of a new strategy or
behavior. A new strategy may be installed through any of the
NLP™ skills or techniques and/or any combination thereof.
Kinesthetic
Relating to body sensations. In NLP the term kinesthetics is
used to encompass all kinds of feelings including tactile, vis-
ceral, and emotional.
Meta Model
A model developed by John Grinder and Richard Bandler that
defines syntatic environments by which one can detect and
challenge deletions, generalizations and distortions.
Meta Program
A process by which one sorts through multiple generalizations
simultaneously as such Meta Programs control how and when.
A person will engage in any set of strategies in a given
context.
206 PERSUASION ENGINEERING
Metaphor
Stories, parables, and analogies.
Modeling
The act of creating a calculus which describes a given system.
Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP)
The study of the structure of subjective experience and what
can be calculated from that.
Olfactory
Relating to smell or the sense of smell.
Outcomes
Goals or desired states that a person or organization aspires to
achieve.
Pacing
A method used by communicators to quickly establish rapport
by matching certain aspects of their behavior to those of the
person with whom they are communicating - matching or mir-
roring of behavior.
Parts
A metaphorical way of talking about independent programs
and strategies of behavior.
Predicates
Process words (like verbs, adverbs, and adjectives) that a per-
son selects to describe a subject. Predicates are used in NLP to
identify which representational system a person is using to
process information.
Rapport
The presence of trust, harmony, and cooperation in a relation-
ship.
GLOSSARY OF NLP TERMS 207
Representational Systems
The five senses: seeing, hearing, touching (feeling), smelling
and tasting.
Representational System Primacy
The systematic use of one sense over the others to process and
organize in a given context.
Secondary Gain
Where some seemingly negative or problematic behavior
actually carries out some positive function at some other level.
For example, smoking may help a person to relax or help
them fit a particular self-image.
State
The total ongoing mental and physical conditions from which
a person is acting.
Strategy
A set of explicit mental and behavioral steps used to achieve a
specific outcome.
Sub-Modalities
The special sensory qualities perceived by each of the five
senses. For example, visual sub-modalities include color,
shape, movement, brightness, depth, etc., auditory submodal-
ities include volume, pitch, tempo, etc., and kinesthetic sub-
modalities include pressure, temperature, texture, location,
etc.
Surface Structure
An utterance.
208 PERSUASION ENGINEERING
Synesthesia
The process of overlap between representational systems, char-
acterized by phenomena like see-feel circuits, in which a person
derives feelings from what they see, and hear-feel circuits, in
which a person gets feelings from what they hear. Any two
sensory modalities may be linked together.
T.O.T.E.
Developed by Miller, Galanter and Pibram, the term stands for
the sequence Test-Operate-Test-Exit, which describes the basic
feedback loop used to guide all behavior.
Transderivational Search
The act of locating through meaning (s) which may not be
explicit or implicit in a surface structure.
Translating
Connecting the meaning of one representation to the same
meaning in another representation.
Visual
Relating to sight or the sense of sight.
Well-Formedness Conditions
In NLP, a particular outcome is well-formed when it is: (1) stat-
ed in positives, (2) initiated and maintained by the individual,
(3) ecological - maintains the quality of all rapport systems, and
(4) testable in experience - sensory based.
i
1
ADDENDA
ADDENDA III
SUBMODALITY COMPARISONS
VISUAL Number of Images ___________ Motion/Still ___________ Color/B&W ___________ Bright/Dim ___________ Focused/Unfocused ___________ Bordered/Borderless ___________ Associated/Dissociated ___________ Center Weighted/Wide Angle __________________ Size (Relative to Life) ___________ Shape ___________ Three Dimensional/Flat ___________ Close/Distant ___________ Location in Space/Panoramic ___________
AUDITORY Numbers of Sounds/Sources ___________ Volume ___________ Tone ___________ Tempo ___________ Pitch ___________ Pace ___________ Timbre ___________ Duration ___________ Intensity ___________ Direction _________________________________ Rhythm ___________ Harmony ___________ More in one ear than another
ADDENDA V
KINESTHETIC Location in body Breathing Rate Pulse Rate Skin Temperature Weight Pressure Intensity Tactile Sensations
OLFACTORY & GUSTATORY Sweet Sour Salt Bitter Aroma Fragrance Essence Pungence
MILTON MODEL
The first set of language patterns is
the inverse of the
META MODEL™
The additional other important
language patterns include:
PRESUPPOSITIONS
INDIRECT
ELICITATION PATTERNS
PATTERNS IN
METAPHOR
ADDENDA IX
MILTON MODEL
INDIRECT
ELICITATION PATTERNS
Embedded Commands:
Embed directives within a larger sentence struc-
ture. "You can begin to relax"
Analogue Marking:
Set the directive apart from the rest of the sen-
tence with some nonverbal analogue behavior
Embedded Questions:
Embed questions within a larger sentence struc-
ture. "I'm wondering what time it is."
Negative Commands:
Stating what you do want to occur and preceding
this statement with the word "don't."
Conversational Postulates:
Yes/no questions that typically elicit a response
rather than a literal answer: "Do you know what
time it is?"
ADDENDA XI
MILTON MODEL
PRESUPPOSITIONS
Subordinate Clauses of Time:
Before, after, during, as, since, prior, when, while, etc.
Ordinal Numerals:
Another, first, second, third, etc.
Use of "Or":
The word "or" between the given choices.
Awareness Predicates:
Know, aware, realize, notice, etc.
Adverbs & Adjectives:
Deeply, easily, curious about, etc.
Change of Time Verbs & Adverbs:
Begin, end, stop, start, continue, proceed, already
yet, still, anymore, etc.
Commentary Adjectives & Adverbs:
Fortunately, luckily, innocently, happily, etc.
ADDENDA XIII
MILTON MODEL
INDIRECT
ELICITATION PATTERNS
AMBIGUITIES
Phonological Ambiguity:
Words that sound alike but have different meanings. I,
eye; write, right, rite; weight, wait; their, they're, there;
red, read, etc.
Syntactic Ambiguity:
Take a transitive verb, add "ing" after it, and place it
before a noun. 'They were milking cows."
Scope Ambiguity:
Occurs when it is unclear how much of the sentence
an adjective, verb, or adverb applies to. "They went
with the charming men and women."
Punctuation Ambiguity:
Put two sentences together that end and begin with
the same word. "I'm speaking clearly to make sure that
you can hear you are, in the process of..."
ADDENDA XV
MILTON MODEL
PATTERNS IN
METAPHOR
Selection Restriction Violations:
The attribution of qualities to something or someone
which by definition could not possess those qualities.
"The rock is sad."
Quotes:
Making any statement you want to make to another
person as if you are reporting in quotes what
someone else said at another time and place.
ADDENDA XVII
META MODEL™
DELETION, DISTORTION,
GENERALIZATION
and the Linguistic Patterns of
Information Gathering
Wellformedness Conditions for
Surface Structures:
1. Are well formed in English, and
2. Contain no transformational deletions or unex
plored deletions in the portion of the model in
which the person has no choice;
3. Contain no nominalizations (process is transformed
into an event);
4. Contain no words or phrases lacking referential
indexes;
5. Contain no verbs incompletely specified;
6. contain no unexplored presuppositions i the por
tion of the model in which the person experiences
no choice;
7. Contain no sentences which violate the semantic
conditions of wellformedness. (Quoted from Structure of Magic I. Bandler & Grinder 1975)
ADDENDA XIX
META MODEL™
DELETION
INFORMATION GATHERING
Simple Deletion:
Statement with missing or deficient information.
Comparative Deletion:
Missing standard of evaluation.
Lack of Referential Index:
Unidentified pronoun.
Unspecified Verb:
Verbs that delete specifics about How, When, Where.
ADDENDA XXI
META MODEL™
DISTORTION
SEMANTIC ILL-FORMEDNESS
Nominalization:
Verb made into a noun (thing or event) thus obscuring
the process or action.
Cause/Effect:
A specific stimulus causes a specific experience.
Mind Reading:
Assuming you know what the other person thinks,
feels, etc.
Complex Equivalence:
Conclusion based on belief that outcome will always
be the same. X=Y
Lost Performative:
Value judgments or opinions in which the source of
assertion is missing.
ADDENDA XXIII
META MODEL™
GENERALIZATION
LIMITS OF THE SPEAKER'S
MODEL
Universal Quantifiers:
Generalizations that preclude exceptions or
alternative choices.
Modal Operators of Necessity/Possibility:
Words that require particular action or imply no
choice.
Presuppositions:
Something implicitly required in order to
understand a sentence.
I
ADDENDA —------------------------------------------------------------------
META MODEL™
Surface Structure
Deep Structure
E X P E R I E N C E
ANCHORING
INSTALLATION OF AN ANCHOR
Meta Publications
P.O. Box 1910
Capitola, CA 95010
Phone: (408) 464-0254
FAX: (408) 464-0517
To contact Richard Bandler:
44 Montgomery St. 5th Floor
San Francisco, CA 94104
Phone: (415) 955-0541
FAX: (415) 955-0542
To Contact John La Valle:
P.O. Box 828
Hopatcong, NJ 07843
Phone: (201) 770-3600
FAX: (201) 770-0314
Established in 1978, the Society of Neuro-Linguistic Programming™ is a
worldwide organization set up for the purpose of exerting quality control over those training programs and services claiming to represent the model o: Neuro-Linguistic Programming™ (NLP). The seal above indicates Society Certification and is usually advertised by Society approved institutes and centers. We highly recommend that you exercise caution as you apply the techniques and skills of NLP. We also urge you to attend only those seminars, workshops and training programs that been officially designed and certified by The Society of Neuro-Linguistic Programming™. Any training programs that have. been approved and endorsed by The Society of Neuro-Linguistic Programming™ will display a copy of the registered certification mark(s) of the Society of Neuro-Linguistic Programming™. The Society of Neuro-Linguistic Programming™ is set up for the purpose of exerting quality control over those training programs, services and materials claiming to represent the model of Neuro-Linguistic Programming™.
As a protection for you and for those around you. The Society of NLP™ requires participants to sign licensing agreements which guarantees that those certified and licensed in this technology will use it with the highest integrity. It is also a way to insure that all the trainings you attend are of the highest quality and that your trainers are updated and current with the constant evolution of the field of Neuro-Linguistic Programming™ and Design Human Engineering™.
There are four levels of certification and licensing granted by The Society of Neuro-Linguistic Programming™: Practitioner, Master Practitioner, Trainer and Master Trainer. All certificates issued by The Society of Neuro-Linguistic Programming™, the Society seal, and Richard Bandler's signature in penned ink. Trainers may train Practitioners and Master Practitioners who then may set certified and licensed oy Richard Bandler andThe Society of Neuro-Linguistic Programming™. Master Trainer is a level recognized because of special circumstances and contributions. This level is reserved and can only be granted by Richard Bandler andThe Society of Neuro-Linguistic Programming™. Master Trainers may not certify Trainers except under special written permission of Dr. Bandler.
Design Human Engineering™ (DHE) may only be trained by Trainers of DHE. This level of certification is granted only by Richard Bandler and The Society of Neuro-Linguistic Programming™. Their certificate will specifically state "Trainer of Design Human Engineering™" with the Society Seal and Richard Bandler's signature.
To be sure you are purchasing Pure NLP products and/or services, please call the Society of Neuro-Linguistic Programming™. We are most interested in protecting the technology's integrity. All certifications and licensing carry a two (2) year expiration date, the Society Seal, ana Richard Bandler's signature. You have the right to ask anyone advertising NLP services to show you their license and/or certification. An inability to produce this document may one of two possibilities: either the person and/or organization is defrauding the public, or they have been defraudea themselves by another organization purporting to be a certifying organization. Under either condition, please notify The Society of Neuro-Linguistic Programming™ so that we may take steps to rectify the situation.
Each license and/or certification has a two year expiration date. This is because the technology is constantly evolving and Dr. Bandler is continuing his development contributions to human evolution. The Society expects that those who hold certification continually update their skills and renew their certifications and/or licenses. Renewal is not automatic and is easy. Do not accept certifications and/or licenses without expiration dates. If you have benefited from Richard's contributions in the form of the technologies he has developed, we appreciate it when you help us to point out the charlatans who are out there misinforming the public. This is more of a moral issue than anything else. Richard and the Society are interested in people doing the right things and becoming very prosperous in all areas of their lives. There is an unlimited amount of opportunity for everyone. There is no need to steal.
If you are certified at any level of Design Human Engineering™, you must obtain express written permission for each usage of the term or symbol (DHE™) from Richard Bandler. This can be obtained by contacting the First Institute of NLP™ and DHE™ at (415) 955-0541 or 44 Montgomery St 5th floor, San Francisco, Ca. 94104. Each use of the term Design Human Engineering™ must be earmarked with a (™) as well as a symbol that refers to the phrase "Design Human Engineering™ and DHE™ is used with express written permission of Richard Bandler."
ONLY RICHARD BANDLER, PERSONALLY, MAY TRAIN TRAINERS OF NLP™, except under express written permission from Richard Bandler.
Should you be a member of the Society of Neuro-Linguistic Programming™ and have not complied with the above requirements, we wish to make you aware that you may grandfather your trainees for a limited time.
The Society publishes its directory of members in good standing and is happy to provide referrals upon request and encourages participation in this opportunity to make a difference for everyone.
©1994 The Society of Neuro-Linguistic Programming™ and Richard Bandler
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